Public Legal Education

Debate between Jessica Morden and Ranil Jayawardena

Tuesday 15th May 2018 Westminster Hall

[Mr Jayawardena]

I thank my hon. Friend for that point. She has been a champion of greater diversity, and she is of course right that we should not exclude any community from the legal system. I will deal with those points later also. PLE, where it is implemented, provides people of all ages and backgrounds with awareness, knowledge and understanding. As a Conservative, I believe in people—the duty, desire and ability of people to look after themselves, their families and one another. PLE helps people do just that. It gives them the confidence to do it, and to gain the skills they need to deal with disputes and gain access to justice, in consequence improving the accuracy, efficacy and fairness of our justice system.

Equally important, however, is that PLE helps people to recognise when they may need support, what sort of advice is available and how to go about getting it, giving people their independence. In other words, I believe it can create less Government intervention in people’s lives, allowing them to get on with living their own good lives where they cause no harm to others.

Above all, PLE enables people to become fully participating citizens in our big society, whether through jury service or by serving as a magistrate, which I am proud to say my father has done for around 15 years, instilling in me the same example of those values of public service and participation in the legal system as colleagues here in Parliament do. PLE increases citizens’ knowledge of this mother of all Parliaments, the birthplace of parliamentary democracy, where we make the laws that others implement. It increases political engagement and, I hope, will increase representation.

Without understanding how our legal system works—without understanding actions and their consequences—people cannot live John Stuart Mill’s harm principle or understand the realist decisions that politicians must make. Without proper PLE, people vote for—dare I say—wishful thinking policies, borrowing potentially trillions of pounds more on our country’s credit card without thinking through what it really means. PLE and public financial education are similar and equally important, but I fear that PLE is often the forgotten half of that important paradigm.

One of the most important groups for us to reach with PLE is young people. Good PLE in schools will develop, by extension, fully participating citizens, who have the tools to confidently engage in our democratic parliamentary system under the rule of law, and therefore citizens who do not respond to views different from their own with violence such as we saw in the 2011 London riots, or by potentially no-platforming public speech as others do, or indeed by demanding a second referendum to overthrow the democratically expressed will of the British people without any consideration for the other side of the argument. Who knows? Some might even be encouraged to pursue law as a career—I should say that my wife is a non-practising solicitor—helping to expand the capacity of the UK’s world-leading services industry and, consequently, our economy.

Organisations such as the Citizenship Foundation have been working in hundreds of schools and colleges for almost 30 years to help deliver an important part of citizenship education. By helping legal professionals to partner with schools and young people and helping teachers to deliver engaging citizenship education, they aim to help

“young people to understand their rights and responsibilities as active citizens”.

Pupils at schools in my North East Hampshire constituency benefit, too. One of the Citizenship Foundation’s PLE initiatives is an annual mock trial competition, run in conjunction with Her Majesty’s Courts and Tribunals Service, with Hampshire heats, including a magistrates mock trial at Winchester Crown court, a Southampton heat and Bar mock trials at nearby Reading and Guildford. Thousands of pupils take on the various roles involved in criminal cases, such as prosecutors, witnesses, defendants, court clerks and jurors, and learn skills such as advocacy, public speaking, cross-examination and critical thinking, as well as understanding how the court system works.

[Jessica Morden (Newport East) (Lab)]

The hon. Gentleman makes a good point about the experiences of his constituents, but does he agree that while it is a very good thing for people to know their rights, being able to enforce them in a real court is what really matters, and that the Government’s cuts to legal aid and court closures have cut people’s ability to do that?

[Mr Jayawardena]

It is a shame that some people have to play politics on a day when we can commend the work of outside organisations that are doing much good work in schools, in my constituency and others. Indeed, by encouraging more young people to understand their legal position, I hope—I have mentioned it already and I mention it again—that more people will be able to take the right action, so that they need not face action in the courts. I think we can actually help people to help themselves to better understand their position in the legal system, and to find where they can get the advice they need.

If the hon. Lady will allow me to continue, I think it is absolutely fantastic that legal professionals, who are the experts in this area, are so involved. The cases in those mock trials are heard in front of real judges and magistrates, who give feedback to the teams. Some 2,000 legal professionals, including solicitors and barristers, volunteer their time to support these events. As Members of Parliament, I think we have a platform to encourage more dedicated legal professionals to get involved and to support those initiatives—indeed, to commend those initiatives and thank them for what they do.

Another example of a great PLE initiative that we need to see more of, and which might help to address the point raised by the hon. Member for Newport East (Jessica Morden), is the legal branch of the Experts in Schools scheme. The scheme trains volunteer professionals from the Citizenship Foundation’s 40 corporate legal partners and matches them with schools, where they deliver sessions on subjects relevant to young people, such as social media or consumer rights.

As well as providing classroom resources for topical legal issues and immersion conferences led by leading barristers, the Citizenship Foundation wants to reach young people directly. It produces a pocket-sized guide to the law—“Young Citizen’s Passport”—which is now on its 17th edition. Millions of copies have been distributed. I put a call out here and now to fellow Members to encourage our generous and fantastically civic-minded law firms up and down the country, and indeed the wider voluntary sector, to consider whether they can help with this in the years ahead.

Other organisations also have worthy PLE initiatives, such as BPP University’s Streetlaw programme. Showing the potential for everyone to succeed, BPP University law students research, design, draft and deliver interactive presentations on the law to community groups that might not have access to legal information or education, or to those groups that may have a negative perspective of the legal system. Those can include basic presentations on civil and criminal rights to primary and secondary school classes in disadvantaged communities, helping children to learn about the legal system, the courts and the people who appear in them in an interesting and enjoyable way, as the group is currently doing across London. At the other end of the spectrum, I would contend, they can be presentations to enhance prisoners’ understanding of the role that law plays in civic society while imparting general legal information, with the aim of equipping prisoners with the skills and knowledge that will facilitate their reintegration into society upon their release. Those are absolutely critical in ensuring that no one is left behind.

BPP University also has a third branch of the scheme that works with several shelters and charities to provide highly practical presentations to homeless people, who are sadly part of the group of people who are largely sceptical of the English legal system. That takes us back to the principles that I voiced at the start: helping people to help themselves, empowering people to become fully participating members of society and allowing people to live their own lives within the law.

These smart initiatives I have highlighted make a great start, but we must do more to provide a legal foundation that stays with people throughout their lives. That is why I regularly speak to pupils at my own local schools about democratic engagement, and why I participate in schools’ citizenship events, such as the model United Nations. I know that many Members do likewise, and I encourage all Members to do so. I also regularly speak to the headteachers of my local schools, and I will raise PLE with them in the months and years ahead to encourage participation in all the great schemes that I have highlighted.

However, I believe that Members of Parliament can go further. We should strongly encourage local schools to make time for initiatives from local charities, even if they do not have time to teach the full citizenship course. Academy trusts, for example, could create the resources to provide such PLE and other citizenship education centrally and then alternate between which of their schools they direct that resource to. Indeed, they could share those resources with neighbours and vice versa.

Further, the Lords Select Committee on Citizenship and Civic Engagement recommended a statutory entitlement to citizenship education from primary education to the end of secondary education, inspected by Ofsted. I am not here to make the argument that statutory involvement by the state is the way forward, although, as with any instance of major market failure, if the teaching of PLE, citizenship and fundamental British values should fade, the Government should rightly consider the good that they could do by stepping in.

However, we miss the point if we talk only about schools. PLE is not just about schools. It can be, and is being, delivered in all sorts of community settings to interested groups by members of the legal profession, but we must not reach interested groups only. There are a range of vulnerable or at-risk communities for whom a greater understanding of their rights, responsibilities and risks is really important.

For example, with our ever-aging population, the elderly are vulnerable to doorstep, phone or online scams, as are we all. In Hampshire in January, a fake detective sergeant, allegedly from the Met, conned a lady in her 70s out of more than £10,000 after phoning her continuously—harassing her, in effect—and sending a courier to her house to supposedly investigate counterfeit money.

There exist phishing, smishing and vishing, and we expect our vulnerable communities to keep up without providing them with PLE? We can do more. The disabled, those with mental health problems, the isolated and lonely and other vulnerable groups also face risks. We are seeing more instances of cuckooing, where gangs travel to towns and befriend vulnerable people, only to take over their homes. That is not good enough. We must do more.

Educating people and their friends, family and neighbours in the signs to look out for and their responsibilities to help one another would help to protect people and help fulfil the duty I talked about earlier—people looking after themselves, their families and their communities. As Sir Robert Peel said when he founded the Metropolitan Police in 1829, as a Conservative, the founding principles of policing a democracy are that,

“the police are the public and the public are the police”.

Everyone has a role.

I have highlighted a whole range of great voluntary sector PLE initiatives and great engagement from the legal professions—both as part of and in addition to their pro bono community work. PLE has links with the school curriculum, police engagement and scam-awareness initiatives, and I commend the Solicitor General for spearheading important work to co-ordinate and focus PLE, so that it reaches as many communities as possible. I am not alone in doing so; his efforts have been commended by the voluntary organisations that I have heard from. Clearly, better co-ordination of PLE initiatives and goals will ensure that everyone works together more effectively. His working group of professional and voluntary organisations does just that. He is doing good work, and may it continue.

Just as with health education or financial education, the long-term effects of public legal education include: fully participating, responsible and engaged citizens; better-functioning public services which are under less pressure and are better able to target resources; and potential savings for the public purse. The British justice system is held up as a shining example across the world. If that alone was not a reason to shout about it from the rooftops—educating the public about its benefits—then improving the accuracy and the fairness of its outcomes must be.

Greater PLE would improve our legal system by ensuring better educated and engaged jurors. It would improve our legal system by creating confident witnesses, aware of the importance of their testimony and often supported factually and emotionally by the Citizens Advice witness service. It would improve our legal system by bringing about the wider participation, and therefore better representation, of communities, as a result of citizens acting as magistrates, for example. It would improve our legal system by helping victims to recognise that they need support and enabling them to seek it in the right places, rather than their circumstances going unreported and unresolved. It would also improve our legal system in many, many other ways.

I am very pleased that we have been granted the opportunity to discuss the excellent PLE already going on in our country. However, I believe that it is more important than ever to equip as many people as possible with knowledge about their legal responsibilities—as well as their rights—under our great British legal system.