My Lords, although I am delighted to support these amendments, believing the Bill to be yet another attack by the coalition on the poorest and those in the squeezed middle, I confess to feeling more than a little hard done by being obliged to speak at all to the amendments in this group. The reason for this is that a draft amendment in my name was refused as not being in scope. The draft amendment was to the commencement part of the Bill, on page 2 at line 38, and says:
“Except that no commencement shall take effect until the Secretary of State is satisfied that legal help is available for all claimants who seek legal advice on the validity of the decision on their benefit entitlement”.
At first sight, it sounds as relevant to the Bill as other amendments that grace this Marshalled List, but there it is. My amendment has for some reason ended up on the wrong side of the line. It is not for me to speculate on whether any part of government was asked its view as to the status of my amendment, but I venture the opinion that it may be something of a relief to the Government that my amendment does not stand to be debated or to be voted on at a later stage.
However, I would argue that the principle behind it clearly is relevant to this group of amendments. It could be called a pursuit of justice or, to put it the other way around, the avoidance of unfairness. Because the concentration is rightly on the measures themselves, what is so often left out of the arguments about welfare reform, whether in relation to this Bill or the regulations that we were debating before our half-term break—in this case, the 1% uprating—is what potential real remedy the citizen will be left with if the department’s decision is wrong. Surely the fact that it is wrong in many cases is not in question. We all know that, with the best will in the world, decisions made by the department are often wrong and very much to the disadvantage of those who want to claim them.
For a long time, this has not been a pressing problem. For those requiring legal advice on their benefit entitlements, legal aid has been available—if, of course, these people came within the criteria for legal aid, and many did. For a small amount of legal aid, quality advice has been available, having the effect of both stopping—this is important in cost terms—hopeless claims and establishing good claims where appropriate. It is a system that worked. Putting it at its highest, it has allowed access to justice for all. At a slightly lower level, it has meant that tribunals have not been faced with an impossibly large number of cases, many of which should never have been brought in the first place. It has cost a fraction of the total legal aid budget and is paid to lawyers who are not by any standards well paid. Yet from 1 April, as a deliberate act of government policy, this legal help will no longer be available for anyone in cases relating to welfare benefit entitlements, whether under this Bill or under the regulations and the larger Act passed by Parliament last year.
Thus, people will not be able to get the advice to which they are entitled. Their access to justice will be gone. The department will get away with wrong decisions and tribunals will be overburdened with what I can only describe as rubbish cases—all to save £25 million per year on welfare benefit advice. Perhaps I may remind the House and this Committee that that is one-tenth—I repeat, one-tenth—of the amount set aside by the Department for Communities and Local Government so that there can be weekly rather than fortnightly collections of rubbish. Is this really a proper sense of priorities for a time of austerity?
Further, everyone who knows anything about this agrees that this is not likely to be a saving at all in the end. The state—I fear that it will be the department as much as any other department and perhaps the Treasury—will eventually have to pick up the pieces when things get much worse than they need to. What does the Minister, for whom I have a high regard, have to say about this? What does he say to those who under this Act will not be able to query a wrong decision about their entitlement? They will not be able to do that because they will not be entitled to legal aid for legal advice as to whether a mistake has been made. How can the Minister or any Government justify this either in terms of common decency, which should appeal to this House and normally does, or even under the rule of law?
4.15 pm