Legal Aid, Sentencing and Punishment of Offenders Bill

Lord Hylton Excerpts

Tuesday 20th December 2011 Lords Chamber

[Lord Lester of Herne Hill]

My Lords—

[Lord Hylton]

My Lords—

[Baroness Whitaker]

My Lords—

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[Baroness Whitaker]

My Lords—

[Lord Hylton]

My Lords—

[Baroness Verma]

Perhaps the noble Lord could speak first, followed by the noble Baroness.

[Lord Hylton]

My Lords, I rise with great caution as a lay man in this very legal debate. However, I read the article in today’s Guardian by the Lord Chancellor, in which he spoke of promoting non-adversarial solutions. I therefore invite the Deputy Leader of the House, when he replies, to tell us a little about how that will work out in practice and to what extent those kinds of solutions will compensate for the very large cut that is proposed to be made to the current legal aid budget.

[Baroness Whitaker]

My Lords, I will be brief. Very much following the speech of the noble and learned Baroness, Lady Butler-Sloss, I should like to add another slant to why the amendment should be supported. The trouble is that Clause 1, as it stands, does not confer access to justice. The wording does not make it clear that such a provision will meet individuals’ needs. It could be minimal, perfunctory and partial, and yet still comply.

What individuals need is the crucial element of what my noble friend Lady King of Bow called in her Second Reading speech the state’s compact with the citizen: that is, if the rule of law is unintelligible and unavailable to the citizen, their rights and responsibilities are withheld, so not only is the individual deprived of what they might be entitled to but democracy is significantly eroded. We should not allow the wording of Clause 1 to be unamended, and I hope that the Minister will recognise that.

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[Lord Hylton]

I support the principle laid out in Amendment 78, which is in this group, because appeals will almost always involve points of law. However, I urge the Government to think further about the kind of legal advice that is essential to immigrants and asylum applicants at a much earlier stage in the process. They cannot be expected to know when they leave their country of origin everything that is contained within the 1951 UN Refugee Convention, nor can they be expected to know the highly complex law that we now have in this country, much of which is expressed in statutes which refer to earlier statutes.

Therefore, I ask the Government to think deeply, as the previous Administration began to do when they set up the Solihull pilot project, about providing legal advice to asylum seekers at a very early stage before even they have had their principal interview. That project has been going on for more than one year. I hope that it will very soon be possible to draw practical conclusions from it which can be extended to the whole country.

Legal advice for these people does not necessarily have to be given by fully qualified solicitors or barristers who know or can be expected to look up the whole range of English law; it needs to be given by persons who understand the current content of immigration or asylum law.

[Lord Bach]

My Lords, I apologise to the Committee for not being present during the first, very important debate. I hope that I informed the principal players in that debate that I would not be here for personal reasons —I had to go to a funeral of a dear friend. I am grateful to the Minister for welcoming me in the manner in which he did. However, when I came and heard my noble friend Lord Beecham making his speech, I wondered why I bothered to come back at all.