Legal Aid, Sentencing and Punishment of Offenders Bill

My Lords, it is always a pleasure to have an intervention from the noble Baroness, Lady Hollis. I hear what she says and of course I defer to the judgment of my noble friend Lord Freud about the Welfare Reform Bill. However, if she had been with us through the passage of this Bill, she would have seen the number of pre-legislative and post-legislative inquiries, independent reports, consultations—it does seem a little bit like overkill. The noble Baroness, Lady Hayter, has confessed that this is a second go at this issue, previously raised without success in the Welfare Reform Bill. This time around she would require the Lord Chancellor to conduct a review of the combined effects of Part 1 and what is now the Welfare Reform Act on a range of measures relating to advice provision and demand for advice. I have the greatest regard for the noble Baroness, Lady Hayter, so it is with some regret that I say we believe that her amendment is unnecessary. We have discussed at length similar impact assessments proposed under other amendments. Attributing the extent to which one Bill or another, or their combined effect, drove a particular outcome would be very difficult to achieve, and, we would argue, could not be answered with any degree of certainty. The amendment implies a very costly, broad and cumbersome exercise that would be highly unlikely to offer any real benefit given the complexity of the questions it would be trying to pose and answer. This is not to say that we are not committed to assessing the impacts of the Bill. I have made the Government's plans in this respect clear. We will assess the true impacts of the Bill as part of the established process for post-implementation review of legislation, much of which was put in place by the previous Administration. The Ministry of Justice is working hard to improve its evidence-base of legal aid clients and providers in order to get maximum benefit from the review process. Such a review is likely to consider the sorts of issues raised in this amendment. But we are not persuaded that the face of the Bill is an appropriate place in which to place such responsibility. I would therefore urge the noble Baroness to withdraw her amendment.