Legal Aid, Sentencing and Punishment of Offenders Bill

I value citizens advice bureaux as highly as the right hon. Gentleman, and ever since the Bill was introduced we have said that we will come forward with proposals to improve the support given by the Treasury. As I have said, at the time of the Budget there was an announcement, which was not much noticed at the time, of £20 million a year to be made available for voluntary advice. For most citizens advice bureaux, legal aid is not the biggest source of their funding, and some do not get any legal aid funding at all. Their advice is very valuable general advice to people with a combination of debt, housing and every other problem; it is not specifically legal advice in most cases. Our Department is not the biggest Department that contributes to such bureaux; the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills has the biggest budget, for debt advice and other forms, and I think that it has ring-fenced its budget and still provides funding. Most citizens advice bureaux have lost a lot of money because local government funding has been cut quite severely, and the Government are producing money from the Treasury to compensate in part for that, so we—not my Department; the Cabinet Office—are now distributing that £20 million to ensure that such valuable general advice is still available. What we cannot do is start inventing legal aid scope, or fail to narrow legal aid scope, as a roundabout way of maintaining funding for citizens advice bureaux, many of which do not receive legal aid funding now—giving them funding that is spent on general advice as much as on legal advice. Of course, the more we extend the scope to help the citizens advice bureaux, which are busy lobbying the House, the more we also help professional lawyers, who also qualify for all the legal aid scope that we are happily enlarging.