Legal Aid, Sentencing and Punishment of Offenders Bill

Debate between Baroness Eaton and Lord Howarth of Newport

Monday 16th January 2012 Lords Chamber

[Lord Howarth of Newport]

I have a number of anxieties about the impact of the Government’s proposals on children in painful and difficult situations. If the Minister can reassure me that my anxieties are misplaced I shall be more than pleased. However, I suspect that they are valid and that a number of amendments in this large group would be helpful.

First, I am concerned about inequality of arms. Wealthy people will be able to go to court armed with their lawyers while people on modest incomes will not. They will therefore appear either as litigants in person or cave in and be defeated because they lack the legal advice and support that would allow their case to be heard on a fair basis. Secondly, legal aid is to be confined to cases of physical or sexual assault. Surely that is too narrow. It will leave unhappy children in inappropriate residential and contact arrangements, split off perhaps from siblings and grandparents. We should surely widen the range of circumstances in which legal aid is available in support of children in those situations.

Thirdly, I think that there will be a perverse incentive. If an allegation of abuse would be a gateway to legal aid, some parents may be tempted to up the ante. In particular, we should be concerned that there may be cases where there has been some violence during the breakdown of the marriage or relationship but there is not a longstanding history of violence and there is no persuasive reason to suppose that there would be patterns of violence in the future; the violence has been generated by the crisis in the failure of the relationship. I do not think that it is in children’s interests that contact arrangements should be determined by such a factor. Of course, it will increase the private law workload of CAFCASS.

Fourthly, there is possibly another perverse incentive if a trigger for legal aid is to be the existence of a formal child protection plan. Some parents may be tempted to allege child maltreatment when other forms of help would be more appropriate and better for the children. Clogging up the child protection system could be disastrous. Again, more private law cases could spin over to the children’s social care workload which is already staggering following the Baby P case and will be under immense pressure with the cuts to come. There will be more formal child protection investigations and more case conferences, often when a more consensual approach would be more in the interests of the child. I fear that there will be increased and prolonged bitterness between parents.

Finally, while the Bill does not propose changes to legal aid for children and parents involved in public law care, clogging up the system with private law cases and litigants in person will have an adverse effect on the speedy resolution of such cases in the courts. That will be harmful, particularly to young children for whom it is very important to have a speedy return to permanent family arrangements, whether with parents, relatives or adopters.

[Baroness Eaton]

My Lords, I rise to speak to Amendment 34 standing in my name and the names of my noble friends Lord Newton of Braintree and Lord Cormack and the noble and learned Baroness, Lady Butler-Sloss.

The reductions to the provision of legal aid as proposed in the Bill will leave 40,000 children and 69,000 18 to 24 year-olds struggling with serious legal problems relating to employment, education, welfare benefits, homelessness and debt. Children and young people affected by these changes are among the most vulnerable in our society, with 80 per cent, as we have already heard from the noble Baroness, Lady Benjamin, of young people reporting civil legal problems also facing challenges and great disadvantages.

The cost of legal aid for children is small compared with the total amount spent on legal aid. The cost of fully protecting all children up to the age of 18 from the cuts to legal aid would be £10 million, which is the equivalent to the cost of imprisoning just 71 young offenders. For young people aged 18 to 24, the cost is £40 million, less than half the weekly cost of youth unemployment. The cost of not providing appropriate legal advice is far greater. We know that when young people do not get advice their problems increase. There are well researched links between civil legal problems and crime. Many young people who have been arrested have higher levels of housing problems, debt and benefit problems, all of which are key factors influencing reoffending. Fifty-five per cent of 16 to 24 year-olds arrested were experiencing at least one difficult to solve civil justice problem.

There is substantial evidence of an adverse impact of legal problems on young people’s mental and emotional health, with 34 per cent of 18 to 24 year-olds not in employment, education or training reporting stress-related illness as a result, and more than one-third going on to use National Health Service services. Citizens Advice estimates, as we have heard before, that for every £1 saved by the removal of legal aid, the Government will spend £8 dealing with the social, judicial and health issues that will result.

Recent figures from the Ministry of Justice give a breakdown of the types of cases for which children and young people use legal aid to help deal with their problems. The top four legal issues for children and young people are debt, housing and welfare benefits, asylum and immigration. Help with legal representation is most often given for housing, immigration and clinical negligence. Eighty per cent of young people reporting legal problems also face other disadvantages, including sole parenthood, having a mental health issue, being a victim of crime, or exclusion from education, employment and training.

It is disturbing to note that many children and young people in the United Kingdom meet the criteria for vulnerability. Thirty per cent of households headed by a 16 to 24 year-old live in poverty and 36 per cent of people presenting as homeless in the three months January to March 2011 were aged 16 to 24. The latest unemployment figures show that 20.2 per cent of 16 to 24 year-olds are unemployed. In 2010 approximately 225,000 young people aged 16 to 24 lived alone.

These are very serious issues for society. We have to ask why so many young people are in such a vulnerable position. However, for us today the issue is to recognise the needs that these children have and the help that legal aid can give in enabling them to turn their lives around. The Government’s proposals will remove from the scope of legal aid most cases concerning education, including disputes about exclusion, school closure issues, bullying cases, disputes about poor educational standards, disputes about grants and loans, and cases about choice of school. Only education cases involving discrimination and special educational needs will qualify for legal aid support but then only for telephone advice.

These plans will leave 29 per cent of children who are currently represented in their educational needs cases without legal representation in court. Pupils with special educational needs are eight times more likely to be excluded permanently or for a fixed period than other children. There is a strong correlation between exclusion from schooling and falling foul of the criminal justice system. Removing legal aid support that enables children to challenge exclusion may have more children turning to crime, which would lead to future youth justice costs for the Government.

I fully appreciate the Government’s desire to reduce the UK deficit, but in order for any savings to contribute to this reduction, the reforms must not generate consequential costs or the shunting of costs to other government departments. The Justice Select Committee in another place reported that the magnitude of these knock-on costs had not been estimated. I sincerely hope that, on the basis that these proposed savings of £270 million from the legal aid budget will not achieve the aim of reducing costs, the Minister will consider seriously the effect of proposed savings on the vulnerable children involved and the additional cost to the public purse of implementing the changes unamended.