Citizens Advice Bureaux

Lord Thomas of Gresford Excerpts

Thursday 8th December 2011 Lords Chamber

[Lord Thomas of Gresford]

My Lords, I congratulate the noble Lord, Lord Boateng, on bringing forward this very important subject, which I am sure is going to be the subject of debates on the Legal Aid, Sentencing and Punishment of Offenders Bill that is shortly to be dissected in Committee.

The English and Welsh Civil and Social Justice Panel Survey: Wave 1, a report published this year by the Legal Services Commission and Ipsos MORI, under the auspices of the Ministry of Justice itself, starts with this arresting paragraph:

“We live in a ‘law-thick’ world, where the ability of people to make use of the law to protect their legal rights and hold others to their legal responsibilities underpins the rule of law, ensures social justice and helps address the problems of social exclusion”.

The key words in that passage are,

“the ability of people to make use of the law”.

The network of 394 independent advice centres manned by Citizens Advice has been critical in enabling the ordinary citizen to claim and protect the rights that have been granted to him by successive Governments in the name of social justice. Sixty-four per cent of its 28,000 staff are volunteers, the annual value of whose contribution to the work of the citizens advice bureaux—were they paid—has been estimated at £106 million.

I cannot match the hands-on experience of the CAB of the noble Lord, Lord Boateng, but when I was a young solicitor in north-east Wales, I would meet, day by day, people with a problem or a multitude of problems. The individual client would come into the office with a black cloud of worry around his or her head; he or she had no idea of what to do, where to go, or how to disperse that cloud. My very first task was to listen; then to put a shape upon that cloud to reduce it into concrete issues; to apply the law to those issues; and, finally, to advise in a way that the client could understand.

I recall later at the Bar taking one case involving a special hardship allowance and another involving war pensions to the Divisional Court to obtain a writs of certiorari, as judicial review was then called. It was all pro bono work. No fees were charged and it was not on legal aid, but it was excellent experience to appear against the noble and learned Lord, Lord Woolf, then the “Treasury Devil”. Modesty forbids me to say who won in those cases. No one could support a wife and family on pro bono work and it could be only an occasional adjunct to a personal injury and criminal practice.

For many years, lawyers in private practice have, to a very large extent, left welfare law in the areas of housing, debt and benefits to the CAB and to law centres and other voluntary agencies. The advice that is offered by the CAB is in two broad categories: generalist and specialist. Generalist advice does not need legal training, and deals with the provision of basic information, signposting, assistance with form-filling and the like. Of course, training is given by the CAB to its generalist advisers accordingly. But the specialist advisers, the paid staff, provide legal help and are mostly legally qualified. Because they do, the bureau where they are employed holds legal aid contracts from the Legal Services Commission, which provides an income of £28.4 million annually.

Under the Legal Aid, Sentencing and Punishment of Offenders Bill going through the House, the Ministry of Justice projects a reduction of legal help for welfare benefits advice of 100 per cent, debt advice of 74 per cent, housing advice of 40 per cent and employment advice of 78 per cent. Will that result in savings of government expenditure overall? I very much doubt it. Removing legal aid contracts from the citizens advice bureaux will leave such a large hole in their finances that they can survive only as generalist advisers relying on voluntary assistance. The specialists will be declared redundant, as the noble Lord, Lord Boateng, pointed out, at considerable cost and no doubt they will use their legal expertise in more profitable employment. Generalists will be forced to say to their clients, “You need specialist advice on that particular issue. It needs a lawyer to look at it”. But where will that advice be found? It will certainly not be at high street solicitors firms, nor in the law centres, which will be even more severely hit by this Bill.

The Ministry of Justice’s own research demonstrates that problems in these areas do not arise singly but in clusters, including the family cluster. I quote from the Wave 1 report, which states that,

“family problems (comprised of domestic violence, divorce and relationship breakdown problems) cluster together strongly … 39% of those who reported suffering from domestic violence in the 2010 survey also reported problems ancillary to relationship breakdown, and 9% reported a divorce. Likewise, 22% of those who reported problems ancillary to relationship breakdown also reported a divorce, and 19% suffer from domestic violence”.

All these things are interrelated and it is even more obvious when you come to the economic clusters. The report states:

“The 2010 survey also re-confirmed the existence of a second cluster incorporating problems linking to economic activity: consumer, money, debt, employment, welfare benefits, personal injury and neighbours problems”.

For example,

“23% of those who reported having employment problems also had consumer problems, 16% had money problems, 16% had debt problems, and 19% had problems with neighbours”.

It is all linked together.

The findings of that report relating to the respondents’ knowledge of their rights is also compelling. Only 22.6 per cent felt that they knew their legal rights when the problem started; 18.2 per cent said that they mostly understood; 20.3 per cent partly understood; and 35 per cent did not understand their rights at all. Those are statistics, and I am grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Boateng, for bringing an illustration of reality from his own area to those statistics.

What will be the result of the departure of specialists from the CAB? First, advice to the aggrieved client that he has no case will no longer be given, which means that the cases taken forward will be more numerous but less meritorious. Secondly, the informal settling of cases will disappear—that is, the telephone call between the citizens advice bureau adviser and the government agency to sort out mistakes and so on. Thirdly, the applicant’s case, if it goes to a tribunal, will not be in a presentable form. If the case is well-ordered and the necessary evidence has been gathered together, the tribunal can deal with an appellant in person. But if he turns up with that black cloud around him, it will be for the tribunal to spend hours sorting out that problem and not being able to come to the issue straight away in the way that it should happen.

With the cuts being proposed, the CAB will become the most vital of all the agencies that prevent social exclusion. So the question for the Minister is this: where is the funding for the specialist advisers of the CAB going to come from when those legal aid contracts disappear? I cannot believe it is the policy of the Government to make it so much more difficult for applicants to present their case that they give up, as the Wave 1 demonstrates so many of them do without help. That will be nothing to do with saving money and reducing the deficit; it will simply be a disgrace.