Legal Aid, Sentencing and Punishment of Offenders Bill

My Lords, perhaps I may intervene briefly once again in these debates, in complete support of the points that have been made, not least by the noble Baroness, Lady Grey-Thompson and my noble friend Lord Phillips of Sudbury but to a degree by everyone who has spoken. As it happens, I have other recent brief experience of this in my capacity as a trustee, along with the noble Lord, Lord Rooker, of the National Benevolent Fund for the Aged, which is concerned with isolated elderly people. We have recently been lobbying Ministers about the apparent assumption that everyone can deal with things on the telephone or through the internet. That is essentially—dare I say it?—a middle-class presumption that does not necessarily apply to the areas that we are talking about now. To their credit, the Ministers whom we have lobbied are, I think I am right in saying, having a round-table discussion tomorrow on how the problem might be dealt with, and I recommend that the Ministry of Justice joins in. Anyone who has been an MP will have been confronted in their surgery by people who just need to talk to someone, with a sense of the body language, to sort out one to one what may be important in their case, what is not relevant to an appeal and so on. I notice the noble Lord nodding. You can spend an hour listening to people who want to tell you their life story and it is only face to face that you can disentangle the points on which they might have a case. This is important to a lot of people who cannot really fend for themselves. I confess that even I, with a pretty high-quality, advanced education, still prefer, if possible, to go and see someone rather than talk to them on the phone because the body language and the feel of the conversation are important. Therefore, I do not think that we should underestimate these things. In a curious way, the Government have acknowledged that in the briefing that I have here. It says that, although it is a telephone gateway, there has to be a careful assessment of whether the advice can be provided face to face or over the telephone. Indeed, they have already decided not to include in the single telephone gateway debt, in so far as it remains in scope, discrimination and special educational needs, as well as, I think, community care. What is it that makes these things so different from other forms of advice? There will be many community care cases, and there are also welfare benefit needs, as well as a need for advice on a lot of other aspects of people's lives. Why is this to be exempted but not the other things? In a way, therefore, I think that the case has been conceded. The costs cannot be large and the need is great, and I think that we are entitled to ask the Government to reconsider this proposal.