The noble Lord knows how Governments work, and spending reviews are carried out by individual government departments. He was responsible for the arts budget, fortunately in happier days with regard to spending. Individual government departments have to take hard decisions. It is an old scheme in government to say, “Oh well, of course defence spends this much more”. You have to make the decisions, and we had to make decisions about the scope of legal aid.
We tried from the beginning to ensure that there was a logic to what we were doing, in that—I have just been handed a little guide to it—we prioritised civil legal services so that they would be available in the highest-priority cases: where people’s life or liberty was at stake, where they were at risk of serious physical harm or the immediate loss of their home, or where children may be taken care. That has undoubtedly meant cuts elsewhere, which the noble Lord, Lord Beecham, outlined, although the dividing line between legal advice and advice sometimes gets blurred.
I should also make the point that the universal credit is not a big bang; it will be phased in over a number of years. Of course we will keep a very close eye on how these things develop and the impact that they have.
I make this point again to the advice services: I know that CAB and others have been formidable lobbyists, and again I make no complaint about that, but the advice service is no more spared from the cuts that have affected this area than my own department is or than local authorities are. We live in hard times as far as these bodies are concerned, and we are trying to give money to the advice sector to help them reorganise and adapt to new circumstances. We will continue to do so, but we cannot immunise them from those impacts.
One of the oldest members of my flock, my noble friend Lord Hutchinson of Lullington—Jeremy Hutchinson QC—sadly no longer attends the House for what I think is the entirely bogus reason that he is 96, but he is as sharp as a tack. He was involved with the Bar in the setting up of legal aid in 1948 and told me, “We really thought that we were creating a National Health Service for the law”. That was an extremely noble aspiration. However, I have also found, particularly since 2010, that given the financial circumstances that we inherited, not just this Government but the previous Government had been looking at whether some parameters had to be set on the provision of taxpayer-funded legal aid. I hope that in taking these measures forward we can engage in attempts to get some kind of cross-party consensus on society’s commitment to legal aid.
In a discussion that the noble Lord, Lord Bach, and I had at University College recently, I said that if he were here in 2015, and he asked Chancellor Balls, or whoever, for £500 million to restore the legal aid cuts, I did not think that he would get a very promising answer as the same economic constraints and realities would still apply. However, there is an interesting debate to be had about the future of legal aid and our national commitment to it. Thus far, we have made hard decisions but I want to make sure that as far as possible we are not left with rough justice.
On the point made by my noble friend Lord Phillips, we will keep the matter under review. I have asked all the various sectors of the MoJ that deal with these matters to keep monitoring the measure’s impacts and effects from day one. I know that noble Lords on all Benches will want to see how this works out. However, I believe that we have done the best we can in difficult circumstances.