Legal Aid, Sentencing and Punishment of Offenders Bill

Baroness Turner of Camden Excerpts

Monday 12th March 2012 Lords Chamber

[Lord Faulks]

My Lords, as a young barrister I had quite a lot of experience of going to employment tribunals. It has now become fashionable to talk about equality of arms but on those occasions when I represented the employer I dreaded the moment when the employee was unrepresented. This usually meant that, quite rightly, extra steps were taken by the chairperson and those assisting him or her to make sure that everything possible could be said on behalf of the employee. On the whole, while I am sympathetic to what underlies the amendment, these tribunals were designed for access by ordinary people without lawyers and, while I should be the last person to stress the fact that lawyers are not always the answer, on this occasion I need some convincing.

[Baroness Turner of Camden]

My Lords, I have spoken on this issue several times in the course of the discussion on the Bill. I support the amendment wholeheartedly. I speak, of course, as a former trade union official. It was my job when working for my union to have charge of the legal aid system that we applied to members. When I saw the provisions in the Bill, I hoped that the unions would begin to impress on their members the necessity of belonging to and having the support of the union when they are faced with this kind of problem.

It is, of course, an enormous problem for the ordinary worker and his family, who depend upon his employment, when they suddenly no longer have it. If the worker has been unfairly dismissed, they need to have access to a way of compensating them for their loss. Unfortunately, the Government also have employment policies in train generally that are designed to make it easier for employers to get rid of workers when they wish to do so.

The arrangements that the Government have in mind, which we have discussed from time to time in this House, are that if the worker wants to get to a tribunal he should have to pay to get there. A fee of £1,000 has been suggested. Furthermore, when a worker gets before a tribunal in future, it will not be a tribunal made up of lay members who have some knowledge of the working practices and industry generally; it will be before a judge sitting alone. In other words, it will be a much more legal system, but there will be no legal assistance to represent the member. All I can suggest to the Government is that perhaps there will be consequences that they had not foreseen. In other words, there will be much more interest in union membership and unions will increase their members—and the Government may not be very pleased about that.

--- Later in debate ---

[Baroness Turner of Camden]

My Lords, I support these amendments. I do not want to add anything to the very detailed case already made by the noble Lord, Lord Avebury, in introducing the amendment. It seems to me that local authorities have an obligation in law to provide sites for Travellers and their failure to do so is responsible for the need to provide legal assistance to Travellers. Otherwise, Traveller families, which include numbers of children, are rendered homeless, and that, in my view, is quite unacceptable. I hope that the detailed amendments before the House tonight meet a sympathetic response from the Government.

[Lord Bach]

My Lords, we agree with the amendments in this group. In Committee, the noble Lord, Lord Avebury, said:

“Ministers say that Travellers must obey planning laws like everyone else; but they demolished the system created by the previous Government under which an obligation was imposed on local authorities to provide planning permission for Travellers’ sites that would accommodate the number of Travellers in each area, as determined by an independent assessment of needs, buttressed by public inquiries. Since the Secretary of State gave local authorities carte blanche to rip up those plans and decide in their unaided wisdom”—

that was the phrase he used—

“whether to allocate any land at all in their development plans to Travellers’ sites, the number of sites for which it was intended that planning permission should be granted has plummeted by half, according to research conducted”.—[Official Report, 24/1/12; col. 928.]

In his reply, will the Minister explain to the House why the Government took that decision and changed the policy that had been set up under the previous Government?