Legal Aid, Sentencing and Punishment of Offenders Bill

My Lords, Amendments 76 and 77 are consequential on Amendment 75. Amendment 75 relates to legal aid for work covering welfare benefits advice and casework relating exclusively to the potential loss of a home because of the non-payment of rent or mortgage. The amendment is advocated by Shelter and backed by Citizens Advice, Justice for All, the Law Society, the Law Centres Federation, the Salvation Army, Young Legal Aid Lawyers, the Legal Aid Practitioners Group, the Housing Law Practitioners Association, the Bar Council and the Advice Services Alliance. The amendment addresses an anomaly in the Bill. Very properly, the Bill leaves legal aid as it is in funding work to defend possession proceedings in the courts, and I commend the Government for prioritising this support. However, the proposal in the Bill is for legal aid funding to be withdrawn for the advice and support surrounding possession proceedings that at present prevents these housing cases from clogging up the courts and leading unnecessarily to homelessness thereafter. I gather that between one-quarter and one-fifth of the time of the solicitors and caseworkers dealing with clients' potential loss of their homes goes on sorting out the non-payment of rent or mortgage, usually relating to benefit claims. Typically, this means discovering that arrears have built up because of a problem with the administration of housing benefit. Unsurprisingly, in view of the complexity of these arrangements, local authorities can make bureaucratic errors, claims forms can be lost, incorrect payments can be made and so on. At present, legal aid makes possible the service that can often sort out these matters through an expert contacting the officials on behalf of a probably confused or inarticulate tenant. The same goes for claims for support for mortgage interest by homebuyers who lose their jobs but are likely to be unfamiliar with the processes of seeking benefits. The shift next year from councils administering housing support for tenants to the Department for Work and Pensions doing so is likely, at least for the first year or two, to compound the problem. It is not just that officials new to the task will need to learn the ropes but that the loss of close working relationships between local landlords and local authority benefit teams will take away an important dynamic for sorting out these difficulties. Shelter's extensive experience of thousands of cases each year is that the possession claims due to rent arrears can often be headed off at the pass by the Shelter adviser making speedy representations to the housing department that may well have failed to assess a housing benefit claim appropriately. Without legal aid, thousands of cases would certainly have gone to court, using court time and public money, and might still not have been resolved. Worse, without this help many tenants would have lost their homes through no fault of their own. On other occasions, tenants will leave matters until the last moment and the case will have to go to court. However, an adjournment will often be granted, usually for four weeks. During that time, the legal aid-funded adviser can beaver away, establishing the facts and negotiating as necessary with benefits officials. If in the future the advisers in such cases are not able to handle the support with benefits claims, if they can deal with matters only in the courts and are not free to treat with officialdom on behalf of the client, and if they have to sit on their hands and do nothing for four weeks after an adjournment, people will lose their homes and costs to the taxpayer will rise. The courts will have more adjournment hearings, landlords will not get arrears paid off and justice will not be done. The chief executive of the South West London Law Centre has explained to me that, in future, to engage the housing benefit officers in a dialogue it will be necessary to issue witness summonses to bring them to court because dealing with them outside court processes will no longer be funded. That would mean costs to benefit officers from having to travel to the court and, no doubt, spend time hanging about, perhaps facing difficulties from not having all the right files with them. It is obviously better for the legal aid-funded expert to deal directly with the official before or during the four weeks of adjournment of a case when so often the problem can be sorted out. If benefits advice relating specifically to possession proceedings is taken out of the scope of legal aid, the funding that remains covered by it—75 per cent to 80 per cent of expenditure—will be much less effective. In Committee, I argued for the continuation of legal funding to cover many other aspects of housing cases. However, the amendment before us today is much more modest, much more focused and simply retains the scope of legal aid to provide benefits advice and casework where possession is being sought by the landlord or the mortgage company. It seems certain to cost the state a good deal less than removing from the scope of legal aid the funding that pays for the work that prevents and solves problems, and ensures that the rest of legal aid spending and the time of the courts is not wasted when matters could be settled away from the courtroom. It means that the Bill will not unwittingly lead to the injustice of people unnecessarily losing their homes because there was no one there to sort out the problems with their benefits, particularly in the next year or two when the whole housing benefit system will go through such dramatic change. The amendment represents a very modest change to the Bill but an important and cost-effective one. I hope it is acceptable to the Minister. I beg to move.