Legal Aid, Sentencing and Punishment of Offenders Bill

Debate between Lord Bach and Lord Campbell of Alloway

Wednesday 14th March 2012 Lords Chamber

[Lord Campbell of Alloway]

My Lords, I will take very little time. I am very concerned about the situation, for all the reasons that were given—and that were put better than I could have put them. I ask only that consideration be given, and an assurance of further consideration, so that this proposal will not simply be cast away in some form of dismissal. That is all I ask for: an assurance that consideration will be given.

[Lord Bach]

My Lords, I am proud to be associated with the amendment in the names of the noble Baroness, Lady Grey-Thompson, and the noble Lords, Lord Newton and Lord Pannick. The amendment is of the greatest importance, and many people outside the House are following it with exceptional interest.

It is perhaps important to remind the House that the mandatory gateway will apply only to those elements of social welfare law that are still in scope—including, of course, for the moment, welfare benefits because of a decision that the House took last week on an amendment moved by the noble Baroness, Lady Doocey. That is a statement of the obvious, because those areas of social welfare law that the Government intend to take out of scope will be quite irrelevant for these purposes. There is no possibility of legal aid in those cases. In effect, the Government are saying that people with those legal problems will have to fend for themselves if they have no money. That is a pretty shocking state of affairs.

We have had a short but powerful debate in this House today—and we had a very powerful one almost three months ago at the end of the first day of Committee, on 20 December 2011. Very powerful speeches were made. I have in mind that of the noble Lord, Lord Shipley, whose final words were:

“There are real dangers that some of those most in need of help will fail to secure it through a mandatory telephone gateway”.—[Official Report, 20/12/11; col. 1764.]

The noble Lord, Lord Phillips of Sudbury, made yet another powerful speech today. The one he made on that occasion was powerful, too. He said:

“If it is mandatory for those seeking assistance to go through a telephone gateway, we will cast adrift a significant minority of our fellow citizens who will never use a telephone gateway for the sorts of problems with which they are confronted”.—[Official Report, 20/12/11; col. 1766.]

The Minister says from a sedentary position that there is no evidence of that. What an unbelievable response. One only has to know from human nature—from living in the real world rather than the world of Whitehall—that that is how people are. It is about time that the Government started taking people as they are rather than as they want them to be. There were powerful speeches also from the Liberal Democrat Benches on that occasion.

I made the point that it was nearly three months ago because we have had no hint of a concession in all that time. We know from a letter that a telephone call will not be free, as was suggested at the time. There will be a cost to the client who has to make the call. It will not be huge, but it will be there—and that is another factor that will apply. It is simply common sense that to have a mandatory gateway for all clients seeking legal advice is absolutely inflexible and will almost certainly lead to a number of people who clearly should be helped receiving no help at all. It will lead to injustice after injustice.

The Bolton CAB is a large CAB which covers all these fields and has a legal aid contract. It runs an advice surgery from time to time. Yesterday it tried an experiment. Every client who came in had their tale told in general terms by way of a tweet, in other words on Twitter, so that one could read each one of these cases during the course of the morning and afternoon while this surgery lasted. One could see from reading these how the world of a busy CAB or law centre or advice centre actually worked in practice. There were 126 clients who sought legal advice on social welfare issues and they covered practically everything that you could think of. I have no doubt that some of those clients were well able to make a telephone call and start proceedings in that particular way, and I am an undisguised fan of telephone advice when it is appropriate. But are the Government really saying, as I suspect they are, that all 126 of those clients would have been able to do this? Are they saying it is not highly advantageous to have face-to-face contact in some cases? And are they really saying that someone who turned up to a CAB should be turned away and told to call a hotline, as will happen unless this amendment is passed? Can you think of a more bureaucratic, fussy and less efficient system and one that is less reflective of the way people actually live their daily lives? I would argue that it is an absurd proposition which is un-British in the sense that it is one-size-fits-all and too dirigiste and inflexible an approach.

Sometimes Governments just get things completely wrong and Parliament has some sort of duty to say so. It actually helps Governments in the long run if they do not charge off in the wrong direction. Here is a short story. I remember when I was a Minister sitting where the Minister is, in the same department, putting forward some foolish, to put it mildly, proposition and then seeing, when the vote was called, many of my own supporters walking past in order to vote in the Opposition’s Lobby and losing the vote for the Government by a large amount. It was the right thing for them to do. Actually, there was so many of them that none of them could be picked out and dealt with later. There is an advantage in numbers sometimes. And they need not even be afraid on this occasion of the noble Lord, the Deputy Chief Whip of the House. Frankly, I would argue that this is one of those instances. If the Government are defeated on this issue and if the Liberal Democrats could just bring themselves for once to vote against the Government, the world would not stop, the Government would not fall, but an enormous mistake might be averted and Parliament would have done the right thing.