Social Welfare Law

Lord Bach Excerpts

Tuesday 25th February 2014 Lords Chamber

[Lord Bach (Lab)]

My Lords, I congratulate the noble Lord, Lord Low, on securing this important debate. As he said, he has attracted an impressive list of speakers, not least the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Peterborough, whose maiden speech we are looking forward to hearing. I hope very much that the Minister can respond to the debate in a positive way.

In my view, the Low commission report is the first positive, the first piece of good news and the first chink of light, if I may call it that, that we have seen for some time in this field. Considerable congratulations are owed to the noble Lord himself and to his fellow commissioners on producing this excellent report and on perhaps cheering us all up a little bit. I hope that the House will forgive me if I pick out one of the noble Lord’s fellow commissioners. Steve Hynes, director of the Legal Action Group, played an important part in setting up the commission, and the leading role he has played in the field of social welfare law over many years has, in my opinion, been outstanding.

It is important to have some good news because for years now the position has looked bleak and depressing, getting worse month after month. The truth is that social welfare law has been decimated over the past four years. That is because the Government seem to have decided as a matter of policy that access to legal advice for some people—often the poor, often the disabled, often the acutely vulnerable—in order to deal with those areas of law that affect everyday life, such as housing, debt, welfare benefits, employment and immigration, is not even a necessity, let alone a priority. This government policy is seen most obviously in LASPO itself and its implementation since 1 April last year.

However, the decision to downgrade this part of our legal system was taken well before 1 April 2013. How else can the following information set out in paragraphs 1.10 and 1.11 of the report be explained? I quote:

“Eligibility levels and the number of cases in social welfare law then increased between 2007 and 2010. This was due to three factors—the recession, which meant more people were potentially eligible for legal aid; a decision by the government to bring more people into scope; and an increase in the budget to allow more civil law cases to be paid for by the legal aid scheme.

When Labour left office in 2010, social welfare law legal help cases had peaked at 485,664 for the year 2009/10. However, by last year, 2012/13, the numbers of social welfare law cases had fallen to 293,319, due to decisions made by the coalition government to reduce expenditure on civil legal aid”.

That is a drop of nearly 200,000 cases annually—around 40% of cases—and all before LASPO ever came into force.

Another example is public legal education, mentioned in the report and by the noble Lord, Lord Low, in his speech today. Following the general election, not only was the outstanding committee that had advised the Ministry of Justice on this vital subject summarily disposed of, but the budget for work on public legal education over the next number of years was suddenly no longer. Now, 11 months after LASPO came into force, the position is much worse and gets worse with every announcement of a closure of a not-for-profit provider, or of redundancies and closures having to be made by big players in this field, such as the CAB and Shelter.

A lot of income from very modest legal aid payments is resulting in a sharp decline in the number of providers of these crucial services. Many fewer people are receiving legal help than deserve to. We know, as the noble Lord has said, that a pathetic, miniscule number of exceptional cases have been allowed through, even though the Government—perhaps laughingly—claim the scheme is working effectively.

This week’s news sums it up. On Friday, RAD Deaf Law Centre, with offices in London and Newport, is closing its doors. Its chief executive has said:

“Funding cuts have had a profound effect on RAD”.

Have we really, as a country or as a society, come to this: that the law centre that helps deaf people in our country has to close because the Government have abolished the meagre legal aid that went to provide important funding so it could do its vital work?

Last Friday, a newspaper reported that the Government are thinking of charging people making appeals against DWP decisions to social security tribunals. Is this a serious proposition, I ask the Minister? How much in charges do the Government think they will get from these appellants? Will it be more than 1% or 10% of the administrative cost involved in setting up these charges, or is it—this is what it seems like to me—just a rather crude attempt to stop people appealing at all, bearing in mind that in recent months 58% of those who wanted to overturn DWP-sanctioned decisions in tribunals have been successful?

The position is grim indeed, and that is why the report is so timely and so welcome. The report does not call for a return to the system that has been wiped away; it looks forward and recommends a number of modest, practical measures that will make it possible once again for everyone to obtain the legal advice that they need, when they need it. The report argues convincingly that, by modest expenditure, by spending a bit of money, the state will save money as all the evidence shows that early intervention in the sorting out of legal problems saves costs, both in human and financial terms in the long term.

The report starts with the premise that access to justice for all has to be the starting point for any proper legal system. It challenges the political parties in this country to disagree. Surely, none of the political parties does. With a general election looming, that is why this report is so timely. It asks us in the political parties to take this issue seriously and develop policies accordingly. That is why we should all be grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Low, and his fellow commissioners. We must not let this opportunity go to waste. We would not be forgiven easily if we did.