Legal Aid, Sentencing and Punishment of Offenders Bill

My Lords, I strongly support the noble and learned Baroness in everything that she has just said. She has very starkly set out the figures and the likely impact of not sending this back to the Commons. She has quite rightly said that people could die as a result. It is hard to engage in this discussion without having a rerun of the long debate that we have just had about the non-pursued Pannick amendment. It seems to me that we are in considerable confusion—and I have to say, with all due respect, that I do not think that the Minister helped us at all in this—about whether what is really at stake is the focus, orientation and purpose of the Bill, or whether it is a genuinely financial provision. We are really—I nearly used the expression ““having the wool pulled over our eyes””. I feel profoundly unsatisfied and unpersuaded by what we heard earlier this afternoon. This boils down to the question of what kind of society we want to live in, and that is why it was so important to pursue the amendment in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Pannick, earlier on. I know that we have lost that, but this amendment gives us one more chance to say to the House of Commons, ““If we do not get this right, people—in numbers that we cannot calculate, but certainly there will be people, women and children mainly, but some men as well—who will die as a result””. I want to give the strongest possible support from these Benches to the noble and learned Baroness, Lady Scotland. I hope very much that we will support her this afternoon.