Legal Aid, Sentencing and Punishment of Offenders Bill

Debate between Lord Low of Dalston and Baroness Benjamin

Wednesday 7th March 2012 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Benjamin]

I would like to ask my noble friend the Minister the following questions. Why is legal aid being withdrawn for advice in cases covering 6,000 children a year who would qualify under the current rules? Will he explain why legal aid is being kept for 35,000 children a year but is being withdrawn from the equivalent of 6,000 children a year? And how, when and where will professional legal provision, not just advice from social workers or the use of community legal advice helplines, be made to ensure that vulnerable children and young people are not left to suffer even more, though no fault of their own? If my noble friend does not have the answers to my questions now, will he have them before Third Reading? Can he give me an assurance that we will have a meeting to discuss what the Government have in mind to replace the protection that will be given to these children? Also, will he undertake a series of meetings to keep myself and those interested informed? Will he agree to make sure that this is a live issue that is retuned to at Third Reading? Finally, will he give us a timeframe and report back to us on when all this will happen?

We cannot abandon children who are in need. It cannot be morally right for us to neglect any child who cries out to us in need. I urge my noble friend to consider the content of these amendments and to respond favourably.

[Lord Low of Dalston]

My Lords, I am not sure why we are discussing all these amendments in the same group as they seem to deal with rather different issues. I should like to take the House back to Amendments 11 and 12 which were introduced at the beginning of the debate. I am sorry that I was not able to take part in the Committee stage of the Bill, but I want to give my support to Amendments 11 and 12, which deal with the removal of welfare benefit cases from the scope of legal aid. Amendment 11 deals with advice and assistance for reviews and appeals to the First-tier Tribunal and Amendment 12 deals with advice and assistance at Second-tier Tribunals in the Court of Appeal and the Supreme Court, plus representation. I will do so briefly as we have already heard from a heavyweight team of speakers who between them have deployed all the main arguments in favour of the amendments with as much passion, power and eloquence as one could expect. However, there are one or two additional points that I should like to make.

The proposal to remove legal aid for welfare benefit cases represents a triple whammy for disabled people. I do not wish to be unduly disabled-centric about this. The proposal to withdraw legal aid for challenges to welfare benefit decisions affects benefit claimants and recipients generally, but as the noble Lord, Lord Newton, mentioned when quoting from the letter of my noble friend Lord Pannick, some 81 per cent of all benefit cases heard in the First-tier Tribunal are for benefits related to disability, so your Lordships can see why this matter is of such concern to disabled people.

This represents a triple whammy for the following reasons, and noble Lords will not be surprised to hear that there are three of them. First, disabled people are disproportionately out of work. The gap between disabled and non-disabled people’s employment rates has shrunk over the past 10 years or so, but disabled people are still some 60 per cent less likely to be in work than non-disabled people. Secondly, benefits for disabled people are set to be reduced, as the noble Lord, Lord Newton, told us, on a dramatic scale as a result of the Welfare Reform Act. Disability Rights UK puts the figure at at least £3.5 billion. The Joint Committee on Human Rights in its report, published last Thursday on the right of disabled people to independent living, in the context of the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities found that reforms to benefits and services risk leaving disabled people without the support that they need to live independently and that restrictions in local authority eligibility criteria for social care support, the replacement of DLA with personal independence payment, the closure of the independent living fund and changes to housing benefit risk interacting in a particularly harmful way for disabled people. So there is less work, much less benefit support and now no legal aid to challenge the mistakes that are bound to be made in such a colossal re-engineering of the benefits system. There is little wonder that it is described as a triple whammy.

People fear that the cumulative impact of these changes will force them out of their homes and local communities and into residential care. In the Government’s legal aid consultation paper, which prefigured this legislation, they stated that legal help for community care should be retained on the ground that,

“the issues at stake in these cases are very important because they can substantially affect the individual's ability to live an independent and fulfilled life”.

Surely, that rationale applies with equal force to disability benefits. The Joint Committee concluded that there is a risk of retrogression in respect of the UK’s obligations under Article 19 of the UN convention—the article on independent living—as a result of the cumulative impact of spending cuts and reforms. It argued that this risks breach of Article 19. If the Government do not look out, with these provisions on legal aid they also risk breaching Article 13 on access to justice, which requires that:

“States Parties shall ensure effective access to justice for persons with disabilities on an equal basis with others”.

Disabled people are twice as likely as non-disabled people to live in poverty. Welfare law is incredibly complex, as your Lordships know. Few of us could credibly claim to understand it. There is no hope of people on benefit, who would count as socially excluded by many measures, being able to cope with such cases without assistance. Someone came to brief us yesterday from Citizens Advice who illustrated just what those cases can involve by holding up a lever arch file stuffed full of case papers. That was only one of three files and by no means untypical.

The views of the Joint Committee on Human Rights and its international obligations should give the Government pause in going down this track of withdrawing legal aid from those in need of taking up welfare benefit cases.