Legal Aid, Sentencing and Punishment of Offenders Bill

My Lords, I rise to speak to Amendments 74A and 74B about legal aid for debt, and in so doing I declare an interest as chair of the Consumer Credit Counselling Service. Under the proposals in the Bill, all legal aid for debt issues, including advice, is excluded from the scope of legal aid, except for legal services provided in relation to a bankruptcy order against individuals, under Part IX of the Insolvency Act 1986, where the individual's estate includes their home. The purpose of our amendments is to reverse that proposal. We believe that it starts from the wrong premise, that it will not save money and that we will lose an effective and well used remedy, the debt relief order, which helps the poorest and most indebted in our society. Debt problems are sadly increasingly common, and unless dealt with promptly and effectively can have a major impact on individuals, families and communities. A recent report from the Legal Services Commission confirms that there are a variety of causes of debt problems, the most common being changing circumstances such as ill health, relationship breakdown and loss of employment. Qualitative interviews, and I confirm this from my own experience, often reveal particularly distressing impacts on parents' relationships with their children and on the wider family. More generally, debt problems have been found to make it difficult for people to carry on living normal lives. In the same report, the average cost to the public and in lost economic output is estimated at over £1,000 per debt case, with more serious problems involving costs of many times this amount. So we can say with some confidence that debt problems are serious and that they can, and often do, have direct consequences. We therefore reject the premise that debt cases should be removed from the scope of legal aid. When we debated this issue in Committee, the point was made that all debt problems are underpinned by complex contractual obligations and that, in the majority of cases, such advice and support take place within a legal framework that will involve issues of liability, consumer credit contracts, creditors' enforcement powers, statutory debt remedies and enforcement processes within the court system and beyond. As I have mentioned already, there is another dimension to this, which is that most, if not all, of those who contact my charity and other providers of debt advice almost always have other issues, such as illness, employment problems or relationship problems that have either caused the debt problem or contributed to it. It is this compounding effect that makes the withdrawal of legal aid for all debt issues such a simplistic proposal. Therefore, my second point is that debt problems should not be removed from the scope of legal aid because the economic and social consequences far outweigh the savings that are being proposed. Our third point is expressed in Amendment 74B. We think that the withdrawal of legal aid for debt will in effect lead to the closure of the debt relief order system, which is operated by the Insolvency Service. DROs can be considered only by application via approved intermediaries working for organisations that have to be approved by the Insolvency Service. Approved intermediaries are usually experienced debt advisers, the vast majority of whom are based in citizens advice bureaux around the country, and they are currently funded by legal aid. In 2011, nearly 29,000 debt relief orders were made, of which 70 per cent were processed by CAB debt advisers in their role as authorised intermediaries. Citizens Advice has made it clear that it will not be able to employ a sufficient number of approved intermediaries if legal aid is withdrawn. If the Bill goes ahead in its present form, it is clear that the DRO system will not survive. More than 20,000 families a year who would otherwise be able to write off their debts will not be able to do so. It is a classic Catch-22; you can proceed with a DRO only through an authorised intermediary approved by the Insolvency Service. If the legal aid funding is cut, there will be no authorised intermediaries and the DRO scheme will simply wither on the vine. This is not just a cut in the legal aid bill; it is the end of a good and effective debt solution introduced in 2007 and used since then by thousands of families faced with disaster. It simply should not happen. I beg to move.