Legal Aid, Sentencing and Punishment of Offenders Bill

My Lords, the noble Lord, Lord McNally, is being a little optimistic. I am sure he willingly accepts that it is the responsibility of this House to scrutinise the Bill in all its aspects, but of course I will not detain the House a moment longer than is strictly necessary. In our debate just now on the availability of appropriate experts to assist the courts, we heard about the importance of evidence-based judgments. The Government make much play of the importance that they attach to evidence-based policy-making. The amendment offers the Government an opportunity to establish that this policy, contentious as it is, if it is to be continued, should be properly based on evidence. That is why my noble friend Lord Beecham has proposed in the amendment the helpful suggestion that, two years after the commencement of Part 1, the Lord Chancellor must commission an independent review to assess various aspects of its provisions. The noble Lord, Lord McNally, offered as the principal justification for the Government's policies in the Bill that it is essential that the economy does not run out of control. Of course, we all agree with him on that. He then asked: if economies are not to be made in legal aid, where are they to be made? I would like to offer a handful of illustrative suggestions to the Government as to where they could more acceptably achieve economies. I take three examples at random. If the Government were to abolish the tax relief at the top rate on pension contributions, they could save £7 billion annually. For the life of me, I cannot see that people who are enjoying that tax relief at the moment need incentivising. There we have an order of magnitude far beyond any economies that the Government hope to achieve through their reforms to the legal aid system. I hope that it is not entirely unacceptable if I venture to suggest that out of the budget of £9 billion or so for the Olympic Games, there might have been scope to find some economy to protect legal aid for the most vulnerable in our society. Again, if that is an untouchable budget, let me suggest something else. The cost of bonuses paid by the Royal Bank of Scotland, a state-owned bank, to its executives is £785 million. That is at the discretion of the Government. So there are alternatives. I know that the noble Lord, Lord McNally, is very conscientious in how he seeks to acquit himself of the Ministry of Justice's responsibility to make its contribution to the reduction in the deficit. He says: if not legal aid, where? If it is to be legal aid, then, as my noble friends have repeatedly suggested, why could not the savings have been made to criminal legal aid? The answer that the noble Lord gave to that a little earlier was that already significant savings had been required from the criminal legal aid budget and it was therefore not timely or appropriate that further savings should be sought. My noble friend Lord Bach disagreed with him. He said that he, as a Minister, had foreseen clearly that there was significant further scope to make economies in the criminal legal aid budget. I have to say that it is a great pity, therefore, that the Government have proposed to make a reduction of only 8 per cent in that expenditure head, as opposed to the 53 per cent cut that they propose to make to support for impoverished appellants.