Legal Aid, Sentencing and Punishment of Offenders Bill

The hon. Lady is right, in that we already have huge deserts in our legal aid provision. The previous Government ran down the legal aid bill substantially. I am sorry to say that a lot of the arguments about the provision of legal aid that we have heard in this place have been rather synthetic, particularly those put by hon. Members on the Opposition Front Bench. Taking the moral high ground is a particularly dangerous position for the Opposition, given the reduction of legal aid provision over the past 10 to 15 years or more. I return to the point about the provision of legal aid for social welfare. I remain concerned that, far too often, poor decision making on the part of the Department for Work and Pensions is leading to a rise in the number of appeals. We know that that number is rising exponentially and that it is projected to increase considerably over the next few years. I make no apology for the Government's wise reforms on welfare benefits, but the fact is that wrong decisions will be made and they will need to be challenged and properly dealt with. That is why I am concerned that, despite the Government's proper concessions on points of law, we are still not in a place where we need to be. Although we have welcome Cabinet Office funding, which is now year on year—another of my pleas has been listened to—right up to the end of the Parliament, we need to understand whether that will be enough to fill what I see as a gap in provision. I am not making a plea on behalf of particular organisations, although I strongly support the Law Centres Federation and my local Wiltshire law centre; this is a plea on behalf of the people who will rightly have points to raise, which will be mixed points of law and fact. I know that other hon. Members wish to speak in the debate before the knife falls, but I shall briefly discuss clinical negligence. I have long taken the view that matters of clinical negligence should remain within the scope of legal aid. I accept that there are constraints on Government finances, but this is one of those areas where assistance still needs to be provided for challenges to decisions and errors made by the state or its representatives—I strongly believe that that needs to be an underlying philosophy in rebalancing how we spend our legal aid budget. Clinical negligence falls clearly into that bracket. Neither of the proposed amendments in this area does the job as effectively as I would like, but I am sad to say that nor does the Government's current amendment. I can see problems in arguments about whether the child will have reached eight weeks after birth and what the date of expected birth would be; there will be arguments about how children and babies will fit into the criteria. If we are saying that they are in the exceptional cases category in any case, the Government's amendment does not add up to very much. I say that with respect to my colleagues. So there are still questions to be answered on two particular areas about which I have concerns. With those observations, I will allow others to enter the debate.