Legal Aid

Baroness Kennedy of Shaws Excerpts

Thursday 11th July 2013 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Kennedy of The Shaws]

My Lords, I, too, express my gratitude to the noble Baroness, Lady Deech, for securing this timely debate. I also declare that I am a practising barrister. I am the chair of Justice, the pre-eminent policy organisation working on the rule of law here in the United Kingdom and the British arm of the International Commission of Jurists. I am also the co-chair of the International Bar Association’s Institute of Human Rights.

My practice at the Bar, and my work with these organisations at a high level, have absolutely convinced me of a number of things. One of those is that I do not need to persuade people of the vital role of just law here in Britain and in societies around the world. It is also a constant reminder to me of the place of the United Kingdom as a source of influence and admiration the world over. Our judges are universally admired and drawn upon for their skills. Our professionals are deemed to be of the highest calibre and international courts comment regularly on the quality of the lawyering from this country. Our legal institutions are, in my view, the finest in the world—and that is not an idle boast. It is not an accident that we have such a fine system. It is great partly because it has taken us a long time to get here; we have built our success out of the hard stones of experience over many generations. Quality, we have learnt, does not come cheap.

This issue, I emphasise, is not just some hysterical pay negotiation as it has been caricatured. Governments wanting to cut legal aid always reach for a base argument, which is to crack the cynical joke about fat cat lawyers acting like a cartel to fix their fees. I hope we will not hear comments about the large number of lawyers speaking in this debate. The reason lawyers speak about these matters is because it is lawyers who see at first hand the impact on ordinary people of savage cuts. They also see the inevitable impact on the quality of work across the board, and they foresee the desperate effect this will have on the system as a whole, not just the risk of injustice but inhibitions on the development of law. Politicians often see cost cutting as a form of surgery, taking off some excess fat, but like the demand by Shylock for his pound of flesh, the removal does not come without real bloodletting and a very serious risk to the health of the body legal.

This debate is actually about an important constitutional issue, as others have said. It is a constitutional issue because legal aid has an important constitutional function. It is about access to justice, but it is also about the integrity of our criminal and civil justice system as a whole. Further, it is a constitutional issue because it is about holding government and public bodies to account. It is not just legal aid lawyers who are complaining, it is judges, commercial lawyers, academic lawyers who study the effects of law on people’s lives, and indeed most lawyers who see that the system is of a piece and that taking the shears to parts of it has implications for the whole. Justice is a central component of any civilised society and we have to maintain trust in it.

The lack of rigour by the Government on this topic is not new. The Joint Committee on Human Rights, on which I serve, regretted the failure of the Government to grapple with the human rights implications of the proposals in LASPO. I am afraid that we are seeing it again. It was only after long and contentious arguments in both Houses that the Government recognised that they would almost certainly face successful human rights challenges if legal aid was not available to the victims of domestic violence, human trafficking or other egregious wrongs. That was when carefully crafted exemptions were created. Yet the proposals in these reforms will substantially undermine those exemptions. It is quite wrong that such important changes should come into being through secondary legislation. As the noble Baroness, Lady Deech, said, they should be subject to the proper scrutiny of Parliament, as was LASPO, and there should be primary legislation. I urge the Government to slow down and think carefully about this.

I enjoyed the account of the noble Lord, Lord Faulks, of being rejected as a barrister by knowing clients. The only time it happened to me was when a woman in Broadmoor on trial for arson looked at me and said, “She’s too small”. It was because she had seen the prosecutor, Tim Barnes, a man of six feet six inches, and obviously thought that the trial process involved some sort of wrestling or armed combat.

The message that in practice we send to the Government is that justice cannot be produced on an assembly line or by bulk buying. What the Government had in mind with their competitive tendering proposals was to give a contract to the cheapest tender. Those ideas about going for the cheapest are still afloat. The cost-cutting is about one lawyer doing a great number of cases and not looking for the specialist. I want to emphasise that some cases require specific expertise, an issue that has been raised. Some clients have a relationship with a particular law firm and it saves time and money to have that firm act for them. Sometimes the case may concern mental health, and lawyers come to have rich knowledge about particular subjects, especially in the interface of law and psychiatry. Sometimes the expertise is in the field of domestic violence, child welfare or counterterrorism, the area in which I have spent a lot of my life. Some specialise in cases that involve abuse of the most terrible kind. A massive reduction in legal aid will interfere with this considerably.

I am still concerned about the flat fee, where people will receive the same fee whether there is a guilty or a not guilty plea. It means that solicitors, human as they are, will have more incentive to get their clients to plead guilty since a not guilty plea entails considerably more work. At the moment, 73% of people plead guilty, but they do so because of the trust they have in the advice of their lawyers. Once they think that a lawyer might be pushing them in a certain direction for financial reasons, trust will be destroyed, and trust is at the heart of good institutions. If the Government want to see the kind of chaos that price-competitive tendering brings to justice, they need only look at the issue of interpreters. Barristers wait for days in court for Serco, which now deals with the interpreter system, to deliver an interpreter. I have heard of young barristers storing multilingual phrases in their phones so that they can explain to their clients that the interpreter has not turned up. Also, the defendant is often not produced by Serco. The waste in the criminal justice system is often about large companies bidding for and securing a contract at prices on which they cannot deliver. We then end up with no cost savings at all.

[Lord Ahmad of Wimbledon]

I remind the noble Baroness that the debate is time limited, which means that when the clock shows six minutes she should be looking to sit down at that point. That is a reminder to all noble Lords.

[Baroness Kennedy of The Shaws]

This is about preserving the quality of our system. Wonderful legal aid lawyers do that, and this is a way in which they are being undermined. They deserve better.

[Lord Ahmad of Wimbledon]

My Lords, before the next noble Lord speaks, I must insist that this is a time-limited debate. I have had to intervene for a second time. It eats into the time of the Front Bench, the Minister’s time, and that of the Opposition Front Bench. I request all noble Lords participating that when the clock shows six minutes, it means that they should sit down.