Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Bill

Debate between Baroness Chakrabarti and Lord Bach

Lords Hansard - part one & Committee stage
Monday 22nd November 2021 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Chakrabarti (Lab)]

My Lords, I support this whole group of amendments from my noble and learned friend and others. The reasons given by noble Lords are hugely compelling and, if anything, I think some noble Lords opposite are not enthusiastic enough. I hear the arguments about the public purse, but we would not be here if civil legal aid, in particular, had not been altogether obliterated and if there was not such a continuing injustice to bereaved families.

Frankly, I am not persuaded that there is something so awful about a greater equality of arms between hospital trusts and families who feel they have been sorely let down, or indeed between those families and a range of public authorities who can afford not competence but brilliance—they can afford the noble Lord, Lord Pannick, over there. I am not sure that “near competent” would be enough if you were faced with my friend the noble Lord, Lord Pannick. We need to have something like the intention behind this amendment; there should be some kind of equality of arms for these desperate people.

My heart broke when the noble Baroness, Lady Newlove, said that she has spoken to bereaved families who think of an inquest as an irritant. We should all be ashamed of that. Inquests, which are supposed to get to the bottom of things and be at least some kind of comfort to those families, should be the absolute opposite of an irritant.

I want to encourage my noble and learned friend not to let this go into the long grass, or to become an interesting probe that does not get anywhere because we are worried about the precise mechanism, because I am very concerned—we are still in the pandemic—about the coronavirus inquiry or inquiries that must come soon. There may not be another vehicle for amendments such as these, or legislation such as this, in time. It is incredibly important that, in a year or two, or whenever those inquiries happen, we have resolved this to some extent.

I fear we will not have resolved the general, dismal picture when it comes to civil legal aid, but at least we can come up with some kind of fix, however imperfect, to redress the balance of advice and representation for bereaved families. There will be a lot of very impoverished, vulnerable, bereaved families who will have nowhere near the access to private or public money. To be honest, whatever your ideological position, even the inequality between private corporations and bereaved families is bad enough, but surely, with public authorities and public money, there can be no excuse for such an imbalance in the use of that public money if we are really interested in the pursuit of justice.

[Lord Bach (Lab)]

My Lords, I also agree absolutely with the principles behind these amendments. It seems as though the Committee has been unanimously supportive up till now.

My question to the Minister is: why have we waited so long for something to happen in the area of inquests? I had hoped that there might be something in what has been rightly described as a Christmas tree Bill to help us along the way, but there is not. It has needed the amendments from my noble and learned friend Lord Falconer and others, including the noble Baroness, Lady Bennett, to raise this issue. I was privileged enough to chair a Fabian commission on legal aid, which reported more than four years ago. We considered this urgent—as I think the world did—then and for many years before. At one stage, Hillsborough was a classic example which aroused public interest in this issue.

Is there work being done at the moment within the Minister’s department to look urgently at this issue to see whether some solution cannot be found? Never mind the rest of civil legal aid—though my noble friend Lady Chakrabarti knows I agree with her absolutely on that—is there not something that can be done in this area as a matter of some urgency?