Criminal Defence Service (Very High Cost Cases) (Funding) Order 2013

Lord Alton of Liverpool Excerpts

Wednesday 11th December 2013 Lords Chamber

[Lord Alton of Liverpool (CB)]

My Lords, perhaps a non-lawyer might be permitted to detain your Lordships’ House for just a few moments. Although I am not a lawyer, I have a daughter who has this year qualified as a barrister and should declare that. I was particularly struck by what my noble friend Lady Deech said in her remarks earlier on, when she reminded us of the deleterious effect that the Government’s policies may well have on this rising generation of young lawyers. Taken together with what the noble and learned Lord, Lord Woolf, said in his remarks about the high ideals that so many lawyers have when entering the legal profession, in pursuing this vocation, I think that the Government need to listen extremely carefully to the very distinguished contributions that have been made this evening and with such force.

I support the noble Lord, Lord Carlile, for two principal reasons. The first is that I think that the Government’s policies will significantly impede the possibility of younger people from more disadvantaged backgrounds from entering the law—the point that the noble and learned Baroness, Lady Scotland, has just made. Secondly, having represented and been associated with inner-city areas of Liverpool since I was first elected to the city council there as a student some 40 years ago—at about the time when the noble Lord, Lord Carlile, began to practice at the Bar—I am acutely aware that social justice does not just require access to health, welfare and decent housing: it also requires access to law. That was a point that I made several times during the course of the LASPO legislation and return to again tonight.

Over the past few decades, much has been done to improve the diversity of those working at the criminal Bar. However, the further reduction of barristers’ remuneration proposed by the Government has alarming social mobility implications. Criminal banisters have already sustained a disproportionate reduction in remuneration over the last decade. The noble and leaned Lord, Lord Mayhew, and others have rightly emphasised the dramatic effect that a devastating 30% reduction will have on those who are now working in the profession. In return, they are expected to work long, unsociable hours and tackle difficult and, as we have heard, complicated issues of public importance.

These further swingeing cuts are simply unsustainable and the reality is that they will deter talented individuals from middle and low income backgrounds from entering or staying within the profession. Instead, the criminal Bar will once again become the preserve of the independently wealthy. Those without independent wealth to sustain them will turn to more financially rewarding areas of practice or to another profession altogether; we heard about the alluring effect of commercial law. They will do so not out of greed but simply out of a desire to receive an income comparable to the earnings of other equivalent professionals.

Yet instead of treating criminal barristers like other professionals, the Government have asked them to bear wholly disproportionate cuts to their incomes. As the Criminal Bar Association has pointed out in its correspondence with Members of your Lordships’ House, no other public service professionals have been asked to shoulder cuts on the scale proposed by the Ministry of Justice. I think that the noble Lord, Lord Carlile, was quite right to say to us at the very outset that this is simply crude.

As a consequence of these measures, the criminal Bar will see an exodus of talent. The results will be far reaching and the consequences borne by society as a whole. That is my second point. People accused of serious crimes face the prospect of not having anyone of sufficient quality to represent them; and there will also be a lack of experience to prosecute the more serious cases in due course. As we have heard, it will also influence the make-up of the Bench as well as the years pass.

It is all too easy to forget the important part that criminal legal aid has played in ensuring a fair and just society because the criminal law is not something that impinges on the everyday life of most of us. Yet when liberty and the protection of the public are at stake, it is paramount that both the defendant and the state have quality of representation. If we accept the fundamental principle that all defendants are innocent until proven guilty, and may not have actually done what they are accused of, we should ask ourselves this simple question: “If I found myself in court accused of a serious crime and was trying to defend my innocence, who would I want defending me?”. If the answer is a highly qualified, independent and dedicated advocate, it has to be understood by us all that the price of these measures is that we will forfeit that, and justice will be the loser. It is for those reasons that the arguments of the noble Lord, Lord Carlile, deserve our support tonight.

[Lord Thomas of Gresford (LD)]

My Lords, it is a privilege to follow the noble Lord and the comments that were made in particular by the noble and learned Baroness, Lady Scotland. Referring back to my own beginnings, I was one of those who, having left university, was not in a position to go to the Bar as I had wished. I became a solicitor, and as a young articled clerk I instructed Lord Elwyn-Jones, leading Emlyn Hooson, in a number of cases. I was attracted by the lustre that surrounded the Bar at that time. Elwyn-Jones was a Nuremberg prosecutor, as was David Maxwell Fyfe, which my noble friend has recently had brought to his attention. Maxwell Fyfe really wrote the European Convention on Human Rights. It was the attraction of this profession that drew me, after serving as a solicitor for five years, to pay my 100 guineas to my pupil master and to enter on a different track as a barrister.

I played my part thereafter in civil cases, but more often in criminal cases, prosecuting, defending and later sitting on the Bench as a recorder. I was proud of the system in which I played such different roles. I was proud of the way in which justice could be achieved under the system that we had inherited over so many centuries. I am really sad today—a word that has been used by a number of people—that we seem to be coming to the end of that great tradition at the Bar. I know that my noble friend says no, but that is not how I see it. I agree with the noble Baroness, Lady Deech, who talked about the suffocation of the criminal Bar by these proposals. That is what I think it is.

I do not wish to repeat everything that has been said so well and ably, and with his usual eloquence, by my noble friend Lord Carlile. He has been an opponent on many occasions but I have also worked with him on a number of cases. We have worked together on some serious matters. I want to focus on the way in which entry to the Bar will be so curtailed by these provisions. When I go to see young people being called to the Bar at the various Inns of Court, particularly Gray’s Inn, it saddens me to look at them and their parents, who are so proud of them for what they have achieved and how they have worked to get their degrees to become qualified. Finally, there they are in their fresh wigs and gowns, all ready to start on a career which has been so fulfilling in my own life—they are ready for it but there are no openings.

Today, if you wish to get a pupillage, you will struggle. Very properly, you receive a minimum level of payment, £12,000 a year, as a pupil in the common law field and criminal field. Last year, a commercial set advertised that it was prepared to pay £65,000 per year to a pupil. That, I think, illustrates the huge gap between the commercial Bar and the Bar with which I am familiar. I accept so much of what the noble and learned Lord, Lord Brown, said—that we deal with people’s lives, and not just with money and contractual obligations and so on, as the commercial Bar does. We make a difference to people’s lives in the profession that we follow. These young people who have come so far will not get the pupilages—and if they do, will they ever get the tenancies?