Legal Aid, Sentencing and Punishment of Offenders Bill

Debate between Baroness Garden of Frognal and Baroness Doocey

Wednesday 7th March 2012 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Doocey]

This amendment is almost identical in scope to the one moved in the other place by the right honourable Member for Carshalton and Wallington, who is also chair of the Liberal Democrat policy committee on justice. It concerns the proposals in the Bill to remove legal aid for appeals against official decisions—

[Baroness Garden of Frognal]

I apologise to my noble friend but it is very difficult to hear what she is saying. I invite noble Lords to leave the Chamber quietly and not to walk in front of Members as they speak.

[Baroness Doocey]

The amendment concerns the proposals in the Bill to remove legal aid for appeals against official decisions about entitlement to welfare benefit. These proposals will seriously inhibit claimants’ access to justice, will not deliver the savings that the Government hope for and will create very serious problems for some of the most vulnerable people in our society.

The amendment is more modest in scope than the one that I proposed in Committee. It would retain legal aid only for people with complex welfare benefit issues, to help them to challenge government decisions by appeal to a First-tier Tribunal. It would not retain the provision for legal aid to help with more general tasks such as form-filling, nor would it go beyond what is currently available.

Nearly six out of every 10 cases which currently receive legal aid for welfare benefit issues involve either disabled people or families with seriously ill or disabled children. The Government consider that these cases have a low priority when compared to safety, liberty and homelessness, but some disability benefits provide or protect liberty, particularly in relation to mobility and maintaining independence, which are so important. These benefits are crucial to many disabled people; they provide just enough money for those people to avoid poverty and to make some small contribution to the additional costs resulting from their disability.

The importance of maintaining legal aid for claimants can be judged by the fact that in six out of every 10 successful appeals against employment support allowance decisions, the claimants were originally deemed to have no factors affecting their ability to work. The Government’s own equality impact assessment acknowledges that disabled people and individuals with specific disabilities are likely to experience a greater impact under some of these changes. The decision to press ahead with the proposals despite that assessment sends a very confused message to the disabled people that the Government have promised to protect.

Legal aid for welfare benefits costs about £25 million a year. Limiting advice to reviews and appeals, as proposed in the amendment, would save £8.5 million, which would reduce the total cost to £16.5 million a year, which is less than 1 per cent of the legal aid budget—but, crucially, it would help 100,000 people. If claimants are denied legal aid to appeal against wrong decisions, their situation will get worse, intervention at a later stage will cost much more and there will be a knock-on cost for other public services.

We are also likely to see a much greater backlog of tribunal cases because panels will be faced with clients who are unable to put together a coherent case because of their lack of welfare benefit knowledge. Tribunals were designed to be informal, inexpensive and accessible but for large numbers of people the very thought of attending a tribunal can be very intimidating. How can the Government seriously expect people with no legal knowledge to be able to negotiate the complex nature of welfare benefit law and to have the expertise needed to be able to decipher more than 9,000 pages of advice from the Department for Work and Pensions? These people are going to have major problems mounting an appeal because they will have no idea what to appeal against. As Judge Robert Martin said:

“If the tribunal is not supplied with the best evidence, the quality of justice is likely to suffer”.

To make matters worse, the Bill is being proposed at a time when the Government are carrying out one of the most substantial reforms of the welfare system in a generation. This will almost certainly result in a huge number of mistakes and a similar increase in the need for appeals.

Surely our overriding duty in this House is to protect those people who are unable to protect themselves. The consequences of wrong decisions for disability benefit claimants can be catastrophic. This amendment would allow some of the most vulnerable people in our society to fight for the benefits to which they are entitled. I commend it to the House, and I beg to move.

London Olympic Games and Paralympic Games (Amendment) Bill

Debate between Baroness Garden of Frognal and Baroness Doocey

Tuesday 25th October 2011 Grand Committee

[Baroness Doocey]

My Lords, I should like to take the opportunity to draw your Lordships’ attention to the good work done by Kate Hoey on sporting legacy and the mayor’s sporting legacy programme. For example, to date, £10.2 million has been invested, with £21 million of match funding, secured, which, in these economic times, is a superb achievement. All credit to the work that she and her team have been doing on this.

Included in this programme are the facilities investment programme under which 38 projects have been funded to provide either new facilities or refurbishment or upgrade of existing facilities; 6,000 training places have been funded for coaches and officials, in particular for disability sports; and 33 projects have been funded under the participation programme—from BMX to dance to rugby. Freesport gives out around 300 grants of up to £1,500 each year to small sports clubs or community groups, where the money is used to provide free sports coaching sessions to Londoners. Every year more than 17,000 Londoners receive at least six hours of free coaching through this programme.

The work that has been done is particularly relevant to those communities which find it difficult to get funding. Kate Hoey and her team have drawn together everyone in sport. They have got them around a table so that disparate decisions are not being made about funding something here and something there. There is a clear, logical plan as to what is needed where so that we do not end up with a borough that, for example, has got very good boxing facilities suddenly finding that some company has come in to set up another boxing ring. Those facilities will be channelled into boroughs that need them, which is a very helpful start. Of course, much more work needs to be done, but if she can raise £21 million for a £10 million investment, it bodes very well for the legacy of sport and the Olympics.

[Baroness Garden of Frognal]

I am grateful to the noble Lord for tabling this amendment on the important issue of the Olympic and Paralympic legacy and for the contributions from my noble friends Lord Addington and Lady Doocey and the noble Baronesses, Lady Ford and Lady Grey-Thompson. I will come back to some of the points they raised in a moment.

Legacy was critical to the UK’s bid for the Games. It has been fully integrated into planning for the Games under the previous Administration and since May 2010. In December 2010, the Government published a comprehensive legacy plan in which we set out full details of our legacy objectives.

Before I say a few words about the specific legacy issues to which the amendment refers, I should like to deal with the requirement to report to Parliament. I suggest that the amendment is not necessary. Since May 2010, following the practice of the previous Administration, the Secretary of State has reported regularly to Parliament on progress with the 2012 Games legacy in the following ways: in the Government Olympic Executive’s quarterly economic reports and annual reports, which I am quite sure are bedtime reading for all noble Lords; in reports against the Government’s legacy plans; and in the Department for Culture, Media and Sport’s corporate plan. Following the Games, we expect government departments delivering particular aspects of the legacy to report to Parliament in the usual way, including through Select Committees. The National Audit Office will also continue to issue reports giving its assessment on progress with the Games.

It will also be important to make sure that we fully capture the wider impact of the Games and the legacy programmes supporting them after the event. That is why we have commissioned an independent metaevaluation of the Games legacy which will provide an assessment of impacts, benefits and value for money. This will take account of more detailed work on individual programmes, including the Cultural Olympiad and the international inspiration programme. An interim metaevaluation will be published in autumn 2012 with the final evaluation due by summer 2013. In addition, Members of both Houses have sought and can continue to seek debates on matters relating to the Olympic Games and Paralympic Games, including delivering the legacy.

I now turn to the specific legacy issues referred to in the amendment. The first is the sporting legacy of the Games. We are determined to get more people playing sport. Some sports are consistently performing, and this should be recognised. Sport England recently awarded additional funding of £3.5 million to reward successful work from netball, cycling, running, canoeing and lacrosse so that those sports can continue to drive up participation. We have emphasised to sports governing bodies that we expect concrete results in return for government investment. Sport England has recently reduced funding for certain sports—basketball, rugby football union, rugby football league and England Golf Partnership—in the light of disappointing participation figures.

I pick up the point made by my noble friend Lord Addington about government not being responsible for everything. We need these initiatives to come from other bodies. We have already introduced a schools Games, Sport England has a £136 million lottery-funded legacy programme in place and we are reviewing with Sport England how to increase the number of young people playing sport. I hope that responds in some way to the question asked by noble Lord, Lord Stevenson, about what is happening with that. I commend the programme that my noble friend Lady Doocey spoke about and the inspirational work done by Kate Hoey and her team. I also pick up the point made by the noble Baroness, Lady Grey-Thompson, about disability sport being an area where we hope there will be a significant legacy from these Games.

In our legacy plan last December we set out details of two major new sports legacy programmes: a new schools Games programme to increase competitive sports opportunities for young people through a voluntary scheme aimed to encourage schools to invest in extending opportunities to all children and not just the most sporty. Eight thousand schools have already signed up. We also have the places people play programme, a £135 million lottery investment to strengthen grassroots sport with more than 1,000 improved local sports clubs and facilities, the nation’s playing fields protected and 40,000 new community sports leaders—

Olympic Games 2012: Tickets

Debate between Baroness Garden of Frognal and Baroness Doocey

Monday 4th July 2011 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Garden of Frognal]

My Lords, I have read the article. I agree that Britain should be proud of what LOCOG has done with ticketing.

[Baroness Doocey]

My Lords, 1 million fans applied for tickets and were disappointed that they failed to get them. At the same time, local authorities have each had 100 tickets for the 100 metres final, the diving finals, the cycling finals, and the opening address. Does the Minister agree that this surely goes against the spirit of Olympic fairness?

[Baroness Garden of Frognal]

My Lords, there have been allocations to local authorities, certainly to those surrounding the Games and those that have been most involved with them. The allocation of the tickets has been done in the fairest way possible given the numbers and the interest in them. With regard to the opening ceremony, the Government actually have 212 tickets, which out of a capacity of 80,000 is probably not too extravagant.