Legal Aid Reform

Debate between Lord Bellingham and David Lammy

Thursday 27th June 2013 Commons Chamber

[Mr Lammy]

It is absolutely the case that in our system the choice of lawyer is fundamental and essential. In fact every democratic country we can think of enables that choice. That this Government should seek now to say that someone facing criminal charges cannot choose, and therefore have confidence in, the person to be charged with preserving their liberty is a huge exception to the democratic system we have sought to preserve for so long. Of course it will lead to huge miscarriages of justice.

[Mr Henry Bellingham (North West Norfolk) (Con)]

I am very grateful to the right hon. Gentleman for giving way and I hope he gets extra time for taking a second intervention. I hear what he has to say, but does he agree that whoever was in power at the moment, having to make difficult choices, would almost certainly have to look at what is one of the most generous legal aid systems in the world and make savings to that budget? Does he agree that the problem is not so much the principle of the savings but how this is being done and the fact that there needs to be consultation on a number of specific points that, to be fair, the Government have agreed to reconsider?

[Mr Lammy]

The hon. Gentleman is right. It is totally unacceptable that the Government have sought to rush this measure through after a speedy consultation that lasted less than two months. It is wrong that there should not be a vote in the House and it is wrong to caricature previous changes to legal aid as having any relationship with these changes. When I was legal aid Minister, changes were made to scope in personal injury in an attempt to take out those who were caught up in speeding or traffic cases in the legal aid system. We introduced fixed fees to maintain costs. We introduced online and phone systems for free legal advice to limit costs. Those were the sorts of changes we introduced; we did not attempt to charge and make an attack on judicial review.

Judicial review is so important. Most people in this country feel that public authorities are benign until they have a disabled child, or one with special needs, and seek to challenge the local authority or the school, until they have an elderly relative in a care home and abuse goes on in that care home, or until they live in the path of High Speed 2 or Crossrail. There are people in this country who would seek to use judicial review and it is a travesty that this Government would run a coach and horses through it for £6 million.

The hon. Member for North West Norfolk (Mr Bellingham) mentioned savings and savings can be made in other ways. Tagging a defendant costs £13.41 in Britain, but £1.22 in America. Let us find the savings through cheaper procurement. Let us find the savings in the court system. Let us not rip up a democratic, constitutional system that we have had for so many years and that has served us well.

We have heard that the parents of Jean Charles de Menezes would not have received legal aid under the changes being made to the residence system. In fact, after these changes, babies in our care system aged under one would not get legal aid, even though children sometimes need access to it. There are many headlines at the moment about Jimmy Mubenga, a young man who lost his life in a deportation case. His family would not get legal aid. Is that really the kind of country we want to live in? Is that what we want to arm our Foreign Secretaries with when they are trying to speak powerfully to foreign Governments who seek to oppress their citizens? It cannot be, so I ask the Department to think again about the decision and to think very hard about the changes it is attempting to railroad through Parliament.

Those are the reasons it is important that we have the opportunity to vote. It is deeply concerning that it has taken senior Back Benchers going to the Backbench Business Committee to bring this discussion to the House in the first place. I cannot think of an occasion in the past few years when that has happened on such a major issue. I ask the Secretary of State to be mindful of the petition signed by thousands of people because they, too, are concerned about the situation.

The caricature that implies that those who are caught up in the criminal system are thick and therefore do not need a choice of lawyer is a disgrace coming from a Secretary of State for Justice. For legal aid lawyers to be caricatured as fat cats when their average salary is less than that of nurses and teachers in this country and when we are talking about high street firms in Bristol, Swindon and Brixton—places as different as that—is unacceptable. This is not about the producer, but about the citizen and the consumer. It is about hard-fought battles that have taken place in this Chamber over many years. I ask the Government and hon. Members to join me in the No Lobby after the debate.

Oral Answers to Questions

Debate between Lord Bellingham and David Lammy

Tuesday 29th November 2011 Commons Chamber

[Mr Bellingham]

I agree that those principles are vital and they are ones on which we will focus and put a huge amount of emphasis. I thank my hon. Friend for his report, and I pay tribute to him and his colleagues for their energy and open-mindedness in reporting back to the Foreign Office on that visit.

[Mr David Lammy (Tottenham) (Lab)]

Can the Minister update the House on the Government’s assessment of growing concern about the position in Malawi—unrest, autocratic rule and real oppression?

[Mr Bellingham]

I am grateful to the right hon. Gentleman for raising that. Although we are talking about Equatorial Guinea, I was in Zambia recently and had a chance not to visit Malawi, but to have an assessment of what was going on there. We are very concerned indeed about the way in which the Malawi Government evicted our high commissioner, but a high level delegation from Malawi recently came to the Foreign Office and we were able to have candid discussions with them. My right hon. Friend the Foreign Secretary made it clear that there are certain measures that need to be put in place before we resume normal diplomatic relations.