Legal Aid and Civil Costs Reform

Baroness Kennedy of Shaws Excerpts

Monday 15th November 2010 Lords Chamber

[Lord Phillips of Sudbury]

My Lords—

[Baroness Kennedy of The Shaws]

My Lords, first, are the Government aware that the greatest advances in the development of law happen in legal aid cases? By diminishing legal aid, you end up undermining law as a whole. Secondly, family law has already suffered cuts, and we are seeing legal aid deserts in certain parts of the country. Women, for example, are not getting the kind of expert help that they need in cases of domestic violence. Thirdly, if the Ministry of Justice is concerned to look at spending on legal matters, has consideration been given to the money paid to lawyers by government, not as legal aid money but money paid by government departments to lawyers at the market rate, which is often excessive? Perhaps we should do something to drive those costs down instead of limiting access to the law by the poor.

[Lord McNally]

My Lords, my noble friend Lord Strathclyde is encouraging me to cheap populism by agreeing that we should drive down the cost of legal advice to government. Legal costs in general are certainly being looked at. I can reassure the noble Baroness that in the key areas of family law, which I referred to as domestic violence and child protection, legal aid will be retained.

On the breakdown of the savings, I have a slip of paper that says that the aim is roughly to try to find £100 million savings on criminal aid and £250 million on the civil side.

On the Statement’s intention, I can say to the noble Baroness only that, against the financial constraints that we face and a general agreement that legal aid needed recalibrating, we have tried to take some tough decisions in a way that protects the vulnerable and retains the core sense of our system: that all have a right to access to justice.