Legal Aid, Sentencing and Punishment of Offenders Bill

Baroness Howarth of Breckland Excerpts

Tuesday 10th January 2012 Lords Chamber

As we scrutinise the Bill, noble Lords may have to inject a more high-quality impact assessment. However, I hope that it will not be left only to noble Lords, voluntary organisations and so on but that the Government will respond positively to my noble friend’s amendment.

[Baroness Howarth of Breckland]

My Lords, I am beginning to feel rather sorry for the Minister as he listens to the debate because I can understand how the Government, faced with the deficit that they were faced with on the change of Government, had to look across the various departments to see where they would find money. I can see, too, working as I do in the court system—I declare an interest as the outgoing chair of the Children and Family Court Advisory and Support Service—that that looked like a pretty tasty budget. I also know that when you look across the range of expert witnesses there are times, certainly in my area, when there may be too many experts and that experts may prolong some cases.

However, having said that, I support the amendment. This is because, having understood where the Government came from at the beginning, I do not understand why they are now unable to rethink, having been given all the evidence, of which we have heard a great deal today. I am not going to speak at length and give many more examples, but we have heard that there is a real need for an impact assessment, if not for social justice then for economic reality. I will give one example from my experience about cases that are in the private realm in the family court.

We will have more cases brought by litigants in person. The evidence is that when litigants in person bring their cases, they take longer. The other evidence is that these families are of the 10 per cent who have not come to a conclusion themselves about what will happen to their children. That means that they are in the most difficult, complex situations that you can imagine. These families need more help. We find that the lawyers who represent them often act as mediators and cut through vast amounts of discussion and argument in order to shorten cases. That is another economic reason for making cases shorter. The more important one is that the sooner cases are resolved, the better it is for the children. The one thing that we have evidence about is that the longer cases are before the court and children are left in suspense about custody or any other issue, the more difficult it is for them.

I hope that the Minister will listen to the arguments, difficult as it is for him placed where he is—he must be between a rock and a hard place. I do not believe that he is a man with a hard heart, so he must be listening to the arguments, but I realise that he is in a hard place economically. He is in the wrong place in that unless the Government look in some detail at some of these arguments—I speak only to the amendment and not to a range of other things—and have a decent impact assessment that goes into this in depth, there will be serious consequences. As the noble Lord, Lord Howarth, said, the reason why this was not done in the beginning was that it was in the too-difficult box. These situations are difficult but they are assessable.

[Baroness Turner of Camden]

My Lords, I, too, support the amendment, which is about unintended consequences. The Government should be grateful that it has been raised at this stage of debate on the Bill because unintended consequences are often a problem with legislation introduced by the Government. In this case, I have had the benefit of the Law Society’s parliamentary brief, which is excellent and has already been referred to by my noble friend Lord Bach. The Law Society has produced evidence mainly concerned with family welfare and clinical negligence. It points out that this measure is designed to save £239 million, but the unintended extra costs are likely to be £139 million.

Frankly, I am interested in the Bill mainly from the standpoint of a former trade union official. My union, of course, provided advice across a whole range of issues to its members and supported them in the courts where need be. In particular, we were concerned about accidents at work. When we look at accidents at work, we are concerned not only about the physical and actual costs; there is also the question of other serious effects. If the threat of litigation in workplace accidents and diseases were reduced, health and safety at work would be significantly undermined, leading to an increase in avoidable accidents. Without recourse to the courts or with reduced compensation, injury victims would be much more reliant on state welfare and supplementary benefits. That point has been made by the TUC in respect of the possibility of accidents at work and support for them being diminished as a result of the Bill unless we have the examination that has been recommended strongly by a number of speakers and is recommended in the amendment.

I do not know whether the Government feel that individuals who would otherwise be facing the consequences of accidents and so on should put up and shut up. Fortunately, many people are simply not prepared to do that and will seek all sorts of other ways in which their cases can be pursued if they are blocked from following them via the court route. That is not a very good idea either because it can lead to all sorts of other problems for people who feel that they have a case but also feel that their way forward is blocked because they cannot get access to a hearing in court.

For these reasons, it is very important that we get the Government to have a very clear look at what the unintended consequences would be from what they suggest in this Bill. It has been spelt out by a number of speakers in this debate this afternoon and I hope that it will be taken very seriously indeed by the Government.