Social Welfare Law

Lord Beecham Excerpts

Tuesday 25th February 2014 Lords Chamber

[Lord Beecham (Lab)]

My Lords, I join previous speakers in congratulating the right reverend Prelate on a notable maiden speech and in expressing profound gratitude to the noble Lord, Lord Low, and his colleagues, for their comprehensive and lucid analysis of the problems of accessing advice and legal support in this critical area of social welfare law, and for the constructive proposals contained in the report.

The landscape the report describes is changing as a result of changes in the financial and, I would argue, political climate. Where once a thriving network of advice services, citizens advice bureaux, law centres, voluntary organisations and professionals was able to support people in times of great difficulty, we are now seeing virtual advice deserts—to use the phrase deployed by the noble Lord, Lord Thomas—within which an occasional oasis can be found, struggling with soaring demand and diminishing resources. As the report demonstrates, and as we have heard today, a number of law centres have closed, with more to come, while the survivors operate with reduced staffing. CABs, serving more than 2 million clients nationally, face shrinking budgets, while the impact of reductions in legal aid and advice increases pressure on them.

Many Members of your Lordships’ House have a long and active relationship with the voluntary sector, especially the advice sector. As a solicitor, I undertook legal aid work. I did pro bono advice sessions with the Newcastle CAB. I helped found the Wallsend CAB in 1973. I initiated the Newcastle Welfare Rights Service as chairman of social services in 1974, and as council leader supported the creation of the Newcastle Law Centre in 1978. The situation of that law centre, the only one between Kirklees and the Scottish border, is dire. From a staff of 14, with five qualified lawyers, it is now down to one solicitor and one adviser, with three staff. It does not undertake legal aid work.

The Newcastle CAB faces similar difficulties. It no longer has any legal aid funding. Its brilliant chief executive, Shona Alexander, has set out in the starkest terms the current position that she, her staff and volunteers, and, most importantly, her clients, now face. Staffing has fallen from 26 to 19, none legally qualified, and 11 of them on contracts expiring in March next year. Funding for a debt adviser by a local charity is ceasing and a full-time adviser and part-time administrator will be made redundant. The bureau’s opening hours have been reduced and demand is such that the bureau closes its doors after half an hour because it cannot accommodate in its waiting room the many people who wish to attend drop-in sessions. The average time taken to advise each client has increased by 50% or more because of the triple whammy of legal aid disappearing, welfare changes and cuts in public services. There is now no funding for interpreters or medical reports, and recently there has been difficulty with deaf clients, with interpreters charging the bureau £70 for an interview. Shona Alexander says:

“Just about every private law firm in Newcastle is referring clients to us because of legal aid cuts”,

and increasing numbers of clients need crisis intervention, especially because of benefit sanctions. She states that, ironically,

“every Government department website or letter refers clients to their local CAB”,

but of course, without providing any direct funding.

As if all this were not enough, there is the difficulty, mentioned in the report, of clients obtaining telephone advice from government departments at premium rates. The Newcastle bureau can deal with only 38% of incoming calls, while clients, some of them specifically referred to the bureau for the purpose by government departments, seek to use the CAB’s own phone lines.

Finally, Shona Alexander refers to two areas of high demand: welfare rights and employment. On the former, hundreds of clients seek advice, for while the city’s service is fully stretched, the CAB caters for non-city residents from the surrounding area as well. The part-time specialist worker is fully booked dealing with complex cases and coaching staff and volunteers with more routine work. In employment, the CAB relies totally on pro bono work from local solicitors, the very source referred to by the noble Lord, Lord Gold. However, there are,

“serious cases of discrimination, health and safety issues and other illegal work practices which are now going unchallenged”.

None of this catalogue of difficulty is unique to Newcastle, as the report makes clear, which is why there is such widespread interest in, and support for, many of the commission’s proposals, as evidenced by this debate. I hope that the Government will respond positively to the constructive proposals in the report. Like others, I was particularly attracted to the idea of public legal education that the commission seeks to promote. Will the Government revive the programme initiated by the previous Government, which, as my noble friend Lord Bach reminded us, they abandoned some four years ago? Will they review urgently the areas of welfare law now excluded from legal aid, particularly those highlighted by the commission in its report—again, this was stressed by the noble Lord, Lord Low, tonight—in relation to housing disrepair, harassment and eviction and disbursements for benefits advice? Will they fund the advice required for applications for exceptional funding and revisit the imposition of fees for employment tribunal applications? For that matter, will they disavow any intention of charging claimants fees to access decision-making and appeals processes, as was mentioned by my noble friend Lord Bach and the noble Baroness, Lady Grey-Thompson?

I hope that the Government will endorse the suggestion of local and national advice plans, adopt the proposals to ensure quality of provision and support moves to share services across the sector and promote pro bono services, recognising that the latter must be seen as supplementing and not replacing properly staffed provision. Will they also look again carefully at the online and telephone gateway services, as others have mentioned, not least in respect of cost?

The report makes relatively modest demands for additional resources but I am slightly apprehensive about the call for local government to fund an extra £50 million. As the noble Lord, Lord Thomas, pointed out, councils already contribute 46% of the funding to CABs—some £73 million nationally. Many, including most of the areas where demand for advice and assistance in welfare matters is most acute, are facing unprecedented cuts in funding for mainline services, including statutory services. Requiring additional expenditure would constitute a “new burden”, which, under the Government’s own new burdens doctrine, should be funded by government and not by further cuts to existing provision.

However, I have a suggestion to make. Many people, alas, have suffered terribly from the recent floods. I hope that that damage will be made good by insurance; according to the industry, the cost will apparently be some billions of pounds. Most of us pay insurance premiums. Funding the commission’s proposals in this report would represent a mere fraction of the cost of repairing that flood damage. Could we not, as a society, treat the emergency situations that so often overwhelm our vulnerable fellow citizens—including many disabled people, as the noble Baroness, Lady Grey-Thompson, pointed out—in the realm of social welfare law as something that we could collectively insure via a modest hypothecated surcharge on our insurance premiums? I invite the Government to consider and cost that suggestion, which may be a better way of helping to make good some of the resource that has been lost in the past year or two.

I spoke earlier about my early involvement with this topic of advice and legal aid. By chance, I recently came across a scrapbook that my father kept of my early years in local politics. It included a letter of mine about legal aid published in the Times in 1971. The Times was the beneficiary of my epistolary contributions as, at that point, I had not taken up reading the Guardian. The letter concluded:

“Is it too late to hope that some of Lord Hailsham’s undoubted energy will be applied to broadening, rather than restricting, the scope of legal aid?”.

This was at a time when Lord Hailsham was mooting changes to the availability of legal aid. I ask tonight: it is too late to hope that the Minister’s undoubted energy, ability and empathy will be applied in restoring the accessibility of advice and legal support for social welfare law, which is a potential life-saver for so many of our fellow citizens?