Legal Aid, Sentencing and Punishment of Offenders Act 2012 (Amendment of Schedule 1) Order 2013

Lord Howarth of Newport Excerpts

Wednesday 27th March 2013 Lords Chamber

[Lord McNally]

My Lords, I thank the contributors to this debate. I have listened carefully to the points they have made. Perhaps I could turn first to the important issue raised by the noble Lord, Lord Bach, on how Parliament does its business and the consequences of its decisions. I would simply remind your Lordships—and the noble Lord had the honesty to do so—of what I said before the House voted on 3 December:

“My Lords, we are almost on the verge of another financial Statement by the Chancellor. I have made it clear that the noble Lord must not lure the House into an idea that following him into the Division Lobby will produce a better offer because it will not”.—[Official Report, 3/12/12; col. 490.]

I do not know how a Minister could be clearer in asking the House to consider that before voting.

Another point is that what my right honourable friend the then Lord Chancellor promised was to use his best endeavours to look for a concession. He came back with a concession which made its way into the final Act passed by Parliament. If the Opposition Front Bench ever returned to this side of the House, they would be as reluctant as we are to have reopened debate on the final settlements in any legislation by the use of fatal Motions. I believe that that would prolong the issue and put pressure on every Opposition to say, “The matter is not closed. You could pass a fatal Motion and that will get us a better offer”. I do not think that is the way that government can operate. The offer was made in good faith after exploring the consequences of the other options. As I say, it would set a precedent for keeping debates running and keeping up pressures which, quite frankly, Oppositions would eventually find difficult to handle. The pressure groups, which quite legitimately keep the pressure on us, would say, “Well, it is not closed now because you could pass a fatal Motion”. That is the point.

It is always flattering to suggest that, secretly, I do not agree with the decision, but I actually do and in part because of my capacity as a business manager in this House. I believe that we gave the House a clear understanding of the consequences. The House took its decision, and that is how the Act is now set.

Turning to the running programme of criticisms from the noble Lord, Lord Bach, again I make no complaint about them. I have said previously that it has been a very strong parliamentary performance, which is absolutely right for someone in the Opposition involved in these areas. I would say, though, that in 2010 we were faced with the situation in which there were going to be considerable cuts in government expenditure. The Ministry of Justice was faced with a budget settlement that had been cut by 23% and, as I have said, it is a department that spends money only on prisons, probation, court services and legal aid.

[Lord Howarth of Newport]

Will the Minister confirm that the Government have just announced that they are going to spend somewhere between £100 million and £200 million on the modification of the Olympic stadium for the benefit of West Ham United Football Club? Why are the Government so open-handed in their funding of access to sport but so cruelly restrictive in their funding of access to justice? What scale of values does that represent? Should equality before the law not be a non-negotiable and irreducible value?

[Lord McNally]

That is the point that I was going to make. The noble Lord is extremely good at self-righteous debating points; I almost admire him for that. The fact is, though, that he has been in departments and he knows that they accept budget targets and have to look through their own expenditure.

[Lord Howarth of Newport]

My criticism was of the Government, and the Minister speaks on behalf of the Government.

[Lord McNally]

The noble Lord knows how Governments work, and spending reviews are carried out by individual government departments. He was responsible for the arts budget, fortunately in happier days with regard to spending. Individual government departments have to take hard decisions. It is an old scheme in government to say, “Oh well, of course defence spends this much more”. You have to make the decisions, and we had to make decisions about the scope of legal aid.

We tried from the beginning to ensure that there was a logic to what we were doing, in that—I have just been handed a little guide to it—we prioritised civil legal services so that they would be available in the highest-priority cases: where people’s life or liberty was at stake, where they were at risk of serious physical harm or the immediate loss of their home, or where children may be taken into care. That has undoubtedly meant cuts elsewhere, which the noble Lord, Lord Beecham, outlined, although the dividing line between legal advice and advice sometimes gets blurred.

I should also make the point that the universal credit is not a big bang; it will be phased in over a number of years. Of course we will keep a very close eye on how these things develop and the impact that they have.

I make this point again to the advice services: I know that CAB and others have been formidable lobbyists, and again I make no complaint about that, but the advice service is no more spared from the cuts that have affected this area than my own department is or than local authorities are. We live in hard times as far as these bodies are concerned, and we are trying to give money to the advice sector to help it reorganise and adapt to new circumstances. We will continue to do so, but we cannot immunise it from those impacts.

One of the oldest members of my flock, my noble friend Lord Hutchinson of Lullington—Jeremy Hutchinson QC—sadly no longer attends the House for what I think is the entirely bogus reason that he is 96, but he is as sharp as a tack. He was involved with the Bar in the setting up of legal aid in 1948 and told me, “We really thought that we were creating a National Health Service for the law”. That was an extremely noble aspiration. However, I have also found, particularly since 2010, that given the financial circumstances that we inherited, not just this Government but the previous Government had been looking at whether some parameters had to be set on the provision of taxpayer-funded legal aid. I hope that in taking these measures forward we can engage in attempts to get some kind of cross-party consensus on society’s commitment to legal aid.

In a discussion that the noble Lord, Lord Bach, and I had at University College recently, I said that if he were here in 2015, and he asked Chancellor Balls, or whoever, for £500 million to restore the legal aid cuts, I did not think that he would get a very promising answer as the same economic constraints and realities would still apply. However, there is an interesting debate to be had about the future of legal aid and our national commitment to it. Thus far, we have made hard decisions but I want to make sure that as far as possible we are not left with rough justice.

On the point made by my noble friend Lord Phillips, we will keep the matter under review. I have asked all the various sectors of the MoJ that deal with these matters to keep monitoring the measure’s impacts and effects from day one. I know that noble Lords on all Benches will want to see how this works out. However, I believe that we have done the best we can in difficult circumstances.