Legal Aid

Lord Goldsmith Excerpts

Thursday 10th December 2015 Lords Chamber

[Lord Goldsmith (Lab)]

My Lords, I, too, congratulate my noble friend on initiating this debate. That he opened the debate as a non-lawyer is not a deficiency; it is a strength. It underlines the fact that legal aid is not just a specialist interest for the legal profession: it is about ordinary people, and everyone in our country who needs legal advice and legal assistance. I want to speak about one particular aspect of that—the effect of the legal aid cuts on the voluntary sector, which provided a great deal of support to people in need. I declare interests as the current chairman of the Access to Justice Foundation and as the founder and president of the Bar Pro Bono Unit.

It is also important to take account of the effect on young people in the legal profession. I note that among the speakers for this debate are two former Lord Chief Justices and one former member of our highest court. I hope and expect that they, as well as the other distinguished speakers, will be able to draw attention to other features that I shall not touch on in my few brief remarks.

Legal advice can make an enormous impact on people’s lives. It can help to reduce poverty and suffering. It has been shown that it also has an impact on government services. If we reduce welfare advice there is an effect on doctors: the amount of advice that they then must give adds even further to their burdens in the National Health Service. That is why legal aid was originally intended to provide a structure to enable legal issues to be identified at an early stage, as well as to deal with disputes once they had arisen.

In that field, the law centres and the citizens advice network have played an enormously important part—but the law centres have lost 40% of their funding since 2011. They used that funding enormously effectively, partly to fund some of their other services, because they could use the green form scheme and other schemes to fund their general activities. Let us take one statistic as an example. In 2005, 30,000 women were dismissed as a result of pregnancy discrimination. In 2015, the figure was 54,000. Where do those women get legal advice, and where do they get the money to pay tribunal fees? It has become so difficult for them to get help and enforce their rights.

The law centres were also able to adopt a holistic approach to people’s problems. People would come in with a specific problem—a dismissal from employment, a redundancy notice or a particular problem with debt—but the workers in law centres and citizens advice bureaux would often discover that that was only one of the problems that that individual had. They would often have a number of other issues to deal with, which was overwhelming for many people, but the specialist advice available enabled them to access other streams of advice within the centres, which would help to solve their problems. They would often get advice on more than one issue.

How is this now being dealt with? I will touch in particular on the advice and support given by those outside the paid lawyers and the legal aid system, although I utterly support that system and agree with all that my noble friend said. The knock-on effect on our court system is already enormous: a 30% increase across all family court cases in which neither party had legal representation. That is a very serious result. Over the last three years, the number of litigants in person applying to the Bar Pro Bono Unit for help has increased 30% year on year. These are all people who cannot access justice without this assistance and they have to come to free legal advice. The Ministry of Justice report on litigants in person in private family law cases found that only a small minority of litigants in person were able to represent themselves competently in all aspects of their family law proceedings. Any of us who have had any dealings with some of these areas—even the lawyers—will know that that must be the case. These are immensely complicated, difficult areas and the procedures of our courts make it more difficult still, despite all the efforts of the senior judiciary to make it more straightforward.

There is much talk, therefore, of lawyers doing more. The Secretary of State for Justice has talked about this. In fact, and I speak from experience, the pro bono intentions of lawyers are strong. When I established the Bar Pro Bono Unit I wrote to all barristers and asked them to volunteer 20 hours or three days of their time a year. The response was overwhelming. In my experience they are always willing to give of their help. But while they give voluntarily of their time, there is also a need for infrastructure to challenge that need. That is why organisations such as the Access to Justice Foundation raise money to support organisations that provide free legal advice. That is why it is important that they should be supported in doing that.

However, even with the profession’s best intentions there will always be a gap and a need for legal services that is unmet—not from Russian oligarchs or wealthy divorcees, perhaps, but from people who need legal advice to deal with the problems that are overwhelming for them in their everyday lives. I take this opportunity both to thank those who support the pro bono organisations and the voluntary sector that do that, but also to encourage the Government to recognise that they cannot turn to the legal profession simply to say, “Pay more money in this way to support these services”. Although the pro bono sector is hugely important, it can never be a substitute for a properly funded legal aid system.