My Lords, I shall speak in support of my noble friend Lord Pannick and the noble Lord, Lord Bach, who is also my friend but not technically my noble friend. I want to put the regulations in perspective and to inquire whether the Government realise the pressure that these calculations will place on other parts of our society. I will mention just two issues.
This Government and their predecessors have pushed very hard to widen house ownership in the past 20 or 30 years. It has been successful. Ownership, of modest homes, has spread to all corners of society. To include their value in the assessment of legal aid places an unfair burden on a modest number of the population who have striven to own their own home. Not only that, but having owned one’s own home one now finds that it has to be sold to pay for one’s care in old age. It may have to be sold to raise money if one has the misfortune to be involved in expensive litigation. Not only that but, heaven forbid, it might even come to a mansion tax. In other words, one is putting much too much pressure on that wide swathe of population that owns a home of relatively modest value. They might have bought it for a five-figure sum years ago, but they will now find their house in that more than £100,000, and then £8,000, asset rank, depriving them of legal aid. The assessment costs will bite into the limited funds that are available for legal aid, because given the way in which the legislation is drafted, assessing whether someone is eligible for legal aid will involve quite a complicated process.
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The regulations will also place pressure on the Bar, which, as I have mentioned many times in this House, I regulate but do not represent. Barristers are already doing an extraordinary amount of pro bono work—they represent people for free, which I discovered when I started regulating—but there is a limit to how much pro bono work can be expected of the Bar, especially the junior Bar, when legal aid is in effect being removed from many areas where the most altruistic of our young people and older barristers practise. There is no more good will by way of pro bono that can be drawn, or no more than there is at the moment.
We have also seen a growth in the number of litigants in person. People who are not getting legal aid are representing themselves. The calculations in these regulations will include a number of people who think that they can represent themselves, or indeed have to. This has caused, as we have already seen in judicial comments, a great deal of trouble for judges, who are trying to control what is going on in court and are finding that cases are taking longer and that there is no parity of arms between the self-representing litigant and the litigant on the other side who may be able to afford a barrister. Complaints are arising from this, because the litigants in person do not understand, and cannot be expected to understand, how procedure works and what can be expected of the judge and the barrister on the other side.
The knock-on effects of these regulations, which almost get rid of legal aid, will bear their own costs. I join others in urging and pleading with the Government to withdraw and redraft them.