Legal Aid, Sentencing and Punishment of Offenders Bill

My Lords, we come back to a matter that we debated in Committee: the pre-commencement impact assessment proposal. I start by quoting something that has not been said for a few years now; indeed, at the time when it was said, although it may have contained quite a lot of sense, it was widely mocked, but I hope that it will not be today. It is a quotation from the then United States Secretary of Defense, Donald Rumsfeld of blessed memory, of whom many noble Lords will be either great supporters or perhaps the opposite. He said: "““There are known knowns. These are things we know that we know. There are known unknowns. That is to say, there are things that we know we don't know. But there are also unknown unknowns. There are things we don't know we don't know””." As far as the Bill is concerned, the Government have been operating as though all that matters are the known knowns. Specifically, they claim that they will save some money by reducing the budget for legal aid. We have been told repeatedly that our legal aid system is the most expensive in the world. Just this very morning, the Lord Chancellor told Radio 4 listeners that what this was really about was clamping down on lawyers' pay. In the context of this Bill, that is a remarkably inept statement; it just is not what is happening with regard to the Bill. Is it seriously being suggested that the fees that lawyers get for doing social welfare law work need to be clamped down on—the £150 fee per case of helping someone with a legal problem on welfare benefits? We are not talking about fat-cat lawyers in this case and it is about time that the Government stopped claiming that that was what the Bill was about. It is not; it is about clients who receive advice and occasionally representation on matters that affect their everyday lives. There are also known unknowns, although the Government are less keen to talk about those. The impact assessment, about which the noble Lord, Lord McNally, and I had a brief friendly exchange across the Dispatch Box at Question Time today, states the potential impacts of the Bill: "““reduced social cohesion … increased criminality … reduced business and economic efficiency … increased costs for other Departments … increased transfer payments from other Departments””—" in particular, with regard to that last item, higher benefit payments for people who have spent their savings on legal action. These have been slightly brushed aside, not least by the Minister, when the Government have been asked what the implications of those impacts are. You do not put in an impact assessment things that you do not think are going to happen; you put in things that you think may or will happen. If it is believed that those things will happen as a consequence of the Bill being implemented, then that is a legitimate target for those of us who are unhappy about parts of the Bill. The Public Accounts Committee in another place asked the Ministry of Justice to invite the National Audit Office to review the impact assessments, expressing great concern that they seemed rather sloppy and unfinished. I believe that more has happened on that in the past few days; a letter has been sent by the very distinguished Permanent Secretary of the Ministry of Justice to the Law Society explaining why Ministers do not feel it necessary or even right for the NAO to look at the impact assessment of the Bill. I would be most grateful if the Minister could tell Parliament what is going on regarding the impact assessment being looked at by the NAO. I cannot help recalling that some months ago the Justice Committee in another place, following its report, asked the Government to set out in much more detail what their assessments were of the consequences of the Bill coming into force. The Government seem to have refused to respond to that request in the committee's report, and I ask the Minister to tell us why that was so. As the House will know, two independent economic analyses, one by Citizens Advice and one more recently by King's College, have done a considerable amount of work on limited information, particularly in the case of King's, about the costs and benefits of this legislation, and they quantify some of the knock-on impacts. The Government, without offering any evidence of their own, have repeatedly rejected them out of hand. This morning the Lord Chancellor argued that, "““we're not taking legal aid from women and children … we're taking legal aid away from lawyers””." That is a statement of immense chutzpah by the Lord Chancellor but is not worthy of him or the Government. The reality is that if the Bill becomes law, the Government will start taking legally aided advice away from women, children, the disabled in particular and many other groups of people. The impact of the Bill will be considerable, and we suggest that it is only rational to plan for its impacts. Unless you do the basic work—work that has been done elsewhere—you cannot possibly hope to plan for what may follow. We know that there will be an impact, perhaps a large one, on other departments, on the lives of vulnerable people and of course on the charitable advice sector, which needs to know where it is year on year and is afraid that, with legal aid disappearing, it too in its turn may disappear. What we are proposing in the amendment would not stop the Bill going through; this is not an attempt to stop it becoming an Act of Parliament. Before the impact assessment that we are suggesting would be produced, the Bill will have received Royal Assent. However, we believe that it would help in planning by other departments, by the sector and by the ministry, and it would help all of us to understand what the impacts might be and respond collectively to mitigate them. We believe that the amendment is actually of assistance to good government and is plain common sense, and I am delighted that it is supported by noble Lords from the Cross Benches who, if they are in their places, I hope will be able to speak to it. I beg to move.