It is good to see you in the Chair, Mr Bailey, for the second part of the debate. I hope you have enjoyed it as much as I have. I will not abuse the position of having time left to speak for more than the two minutes normal for the response. I am grateful for that time.
I am grateful to everybody who has spoken and for the responses we had from the Front Benchers. There is so much consensus in the room that one might wonder what all the fuss is about. I know most of the speeches came from the Opposition, but there was an authoritative contribution from the Chair of the Justice Committee, the hon. Member for Bromley and Chislehurst (Robert Neill), several interventions from the hon. Member for Cheltenham (Alex Chalk) and the contribution from
the Minister. We have heard unanimity on the importance of legal aid, as well as an appreciation of how it needs to work and why it is not working at the moment.
Perhaps that is not surprising. As Members of Parliament we are perhaps in a unique position to see the usefulness and the essential nature of legal aid, from the top and the bottom. We see it in our surgeries, where people bring us increasingly legal problems and we think about how we can resolve them. People have not been well served by the system but are now doubly not being well served in having their grievance addressed. Many colleagues gave examples about areas such as housing and welfare benefits.
A lot of points were made about the contribution of legal aid to the rule of law, whether in ensuring that those accused of criminal offences and threatened with the loss of their liberty have proper representation to avoid miscarriages of justice, or about the broader principle—not simply an individual’s cause being addressed—of policing good behaviour and ensuring that the institutions that we all rely upon give a proper service and do not let down the people they know. Those institutions could be anything from the Department for Work and Pensions to the NHS. Those are essential functions.
The problem is that many of us do not have confidence that the real damage that LASPO has done so far will be addressed. I understand why the Minister cannot say more today, but I hope that she found it useful to hear the comments that have been made. She knows what we are looking for. However the money has to be found and however persuasive she has to be with her colleagues in the Department and in the Treasury, she knows that the savings achieved so far are way in excess of what was intended or predicted, but she also knows that the collapse in service has been far greater than was provided for. That in itself should give the opportunity to make good some of the worst deficiencies that have occurred since then.
I am grateful to everybody who has spoken today. I am also grateful to those from Hammersmith and Fulham Law Centre who have attended the debate. I know that they will be taking the message back to many of their fellow practitioners that we are listening, we are engaged and hopefully we are informed, but it is the Government’s response that we are waiting on before, as the Minister said, the end of the year.
Question put and agreed to.
Resolved,
That this House has considered the future of legal aid.
4.23 pm
Sitting adjourned.