Andy Slaughter
Main Page: Andy Slaughter (Labour - Hammersmith)Department Debates - View all Andy Slaughter's debates with the Cabinet Office
(2 years, 1 month ago)
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Dominic Raab
My hon. Friend the Chair of the Select Committee is absolutely right and I welcome the constructive responses from the Bar Council and the Law Society. He is right that we must do it as swiftly as possible, but he makes an important point that we must do it lawfully. We are following the normal public law principles in having a 12-week consultation. As I have indicated, we intend to bring the proposals into force through an SI by October. I hope that that strikes the right balance. As he and, in fairness, the hon. Member for Manchester, Gorton (Afzal Khan) said, we extend our gratitude to all the lawyers—solicitors and barristers—judges and court staff who have done an incredible job through a very difficult couple of years.
Andy Slaughter (Hammersmith) (Lab)
Does the Secretary of State now accept that the swingeing cuts in the Legal Aid, Sentencing and Punishment of Offenders Act 2012 have hobbled access to justice for a decade? Does he accept what the chair of the Criminal Bar Association, Jo Sidhu, said about the announcement today, which was that it
“will not be sufficient to retain enough criminal barristers to keep the wheels of justice turning and that means victims will be failed”?
If he does not accept that, what effect will it have on the backlog? He currently has a pathetic target to reduce the backlog to 53,000 cases over the next three years. If this is a groundbreaking change, what effect will it have on that backlog?
Dominic Raab
We will take no lectures from the hon. Gentleman given that he was there at the time that Labour was planning those swingeing cuts and, indeed, he backed them. Only now, when we have had to deal with the financial consequences of the economic mess that the last Labour Government left behind and put ourselves on a sustainable footing with the biggest investment in legal aid for a decade, he is complaining.
The Crown court backlog and the magistrates court backlog are coming down. Again, I did not hear from him a clear statement that strike action would be not only unwarranted but the last thing we need as we build back and recover in our Crown courts and magistrates courts.