Legal Aid, Sentencing and Punishment of Offenders Bill

My Lords, in the background to the undoubted need to cut legal aid for economic reasons, it is undoubtedly fair to take as a starting point the Government's realistic decision to continue to fund judicial review for welfare benefit decisions. In their 2010 Green Paper, the Government gave examples of where judicial review would be used, and is used, for benefit cases. I quote: "““As with other areas of law, funding for judicial review will continue to be available for benefits cases. Such cases are likely to occur where there are delays in making decisions on applications for benefits, or delays in making payments, or whether there has been suspension of benefits by authorities pending investigation””." None of those examples of judicial review is based on the merits of the case in question; and the problem with judicial review is just that. Where legal aid is available for judicial review in benefits cases, it will not avail a single potential litigant when the decision taken is simply wrong, the evidence has been mis-analysed and misapplied, and the factual decision is unsustainable. That is not what judicial review is for. Bearing that in mind, I have had to think hard about the balance between wishing to help the Government to fulfil their aims to cut legal aid in a realistic way and those determinations of principle and conscience that some of us have held to for quite a long time. I applaud the measured and economical way in which my noble friend Lady Doocey moved the amendment. She has great experience in dealing with these issues and enormous knowledge of them. Over decades, she and I, and a number of others on these Benches, have attended debate after debate within our party in which the sort of principles that she espoused have been affirmed, reaffirmed and re-reaffirmed. One of the underlying principles behind those principles is that legal aid advice should be available to protect the most vulnerable, who find themselves at a considerable disadvantage, without equality of arms with the state. As has been said, a very high proportion of people who currently obtain legal aid in relation to welfare benefits suffer from disability. I do not suggest for one moment, because it is not the fact, that all people who suffer from disability are less able to represent themselves. Sometimes, however, that is true, and that, perhaps relatively small, cohort of disabled people are the very most vulnerable in our society. I am seriously troubled that, for what may not be a real economy, we intend to remove legal aid from that group. I would be perfectly happy—well, perhaps not perfectly, but getting towards reasonably happy—if I were convinced that the new advice services fund, which has apparently been announced as available from early March to support free advice organisations that have been affected by reductions in public spending, would have sufficient resources for a sufficiently long period for those organisations to continue to provide that advice. I know that the noble and learned Lord, Lord Goldsmith, has spoken on this subject in a number of our debates in Committee and on Report. I hope that this may be one of those debates—perhaps a rare one—in which the Minister will respond to the debate and that, if the Question is put, the House will consider the merits of the debate and be prepared to be flexible in dealing with the arguments put. If the Minister were to tell the House that enough money will be made available on a fairly long-term basis to ensure that, for example, citizens advice bureaux and law centres were able to provide the higher level advice which they have been offering up to now on welfare benefits, I might not be prepared to support my noble friend's amendment, but I have not heard that and I doubt that I will hear it during this debate. As I understand it, £10 million is to be made available to citizens advice bureaux up to 2014, which is significantly less than half of what they need, even making appropriate economies to meet the exigencies of the current situation. My conclusion is that the money to be made available will not mitigate against the cuts in legal aid and still leave citizens advice bureaux and other advice centres extremely financially vulnerable. At the end of the day, will we make any savings in this context in any event? If people cannot obtain legal aid and have to go through the stress of presenting their own cases, or if they are unable to present their own cases and end up in the hands of mental health services or other local authority services which cost a great deal of money, it is very likely that there will be a negative impact on public finance from the removal of legal aid in this area, despite the continued funding for judicial review. My present position is to support my noble friend Lady Doocey, particularly having heard the speech of my noble friend Lord Newton, who has great experience in these matters at a very senior level, unless we hear from the Government Front Bench that there is significant movement on this issue.