Ministry of Justice: Legal Aid Spending

Bambos Charalambous Excerpts

Thursday 22nd October 2020 Westminster Hall

[Bambos Charalambous (Enfield, Southgate) (Lab)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Ms McDonagh. I will be as brief as I can.

I congratulate the hon. Member for Bromley and Chislehurst (Sir Robert Neill) who chairs the Select Committee. It was a real pleasure to serve under him for the two years I was on the Justice Committee.

I start by pointing out—as already mentioned by my hon. Friend the Member for Hammersmith (Andy Slaughter)—the cuts to legal aid since 2010. The budget was cut from £2.6 billion to £1.7 billion. For criminal legal aid, that figure dropped from £1.4 billion to approximately £897 million today. That is a huge cut. Those cuts were made by the coalition Government under the guise of austerity, which underpinned LASPO. The guiding principles of LASPO were to discourage unnecessary adversarial litigation at public expense, to target legal aid towards those who needed it most, to make savings to the cost of the scheme, and to deliver better overall value for money for the taxpayer. Only one of those objectives was achieved, and that was saving money. That money was obviously swallowed up by the Treasury because it was not reinvested in justice and legal services.

Moving whole areas out of scope, such as family, employment, immigration, welfare and benefit law, has led to more litigants in person. As the hon. Member for Newbury (Laura Farris) said, that has caused huge problems in various proceedings. I recently read “Fake Law: The Truth about Justice in an Age of Lies” by The Secret Barrister, and it draws an analogy about litigants in person attempting to navigate legal proceedings with someone trying their hand at removing a gallbladder for the first time. The author says that it would take far longer and create more of a mess than if it were carried out by a trained professional. That is true. The expertise is needed to make sure that things are done properly in the legal sphere.

Although I welcome the £3 million made available to support litigants in person, it is woefully inadequate when we consider the £900 million that has been taken out since 2010. We do need more money in that area. The book gives various examples of people in circumstances that are not in scope, who do not get the legal aid help they need with their cases. Rachel was fleeing domestic violence and a sexually abusive husband. She had to deal with his legal proceedings to have contact with the children. Florence was bought to the UK as an undocumented minor by her mother, then abandoned and made homeless. At 16, she was taken into care, and on reaching the age of 18, she faced detention and deportation unless her status was regulated. Jenna had life-changing 50% burns to her face and body following an acid attack, leaving her housebound and unable to work. She needed help to appeal the decision of the Department for Work and Pensions to strip her of her disability benefits. Those people would have been helped had legal aid been available.

The Bar Council reported that, among their members in 2018, 91% of respondents found a significant increase in litigants in person in family law, and 77% found an increase in civil cases. My hon. Friend the Member for Westminster North (Karen Buck) referred to advice deserts, and the Chair of the Select Committee referred to criminal legal aid being a problem.

The Law Society has noted that there is an existential threat to criminal legal aid firms. Shockingly, there are 124 fewer legal aid firms in 2020 than there were in 2019, which in turn was far fewer than the 1,861 there were in 2010. The Law Society has also highlighted a number of instances of criminal legal practitioners being in decline, and it has highlighted the existential threat. It believes that in five to 10 years’ time there will be insufficient numbers of criminal duty solicitors in many regions, leaving many people vulnerable, in need of legal advice and unable to access justice.

I know that the Minister understands that because he and I served on the Justice Committee when we produced the report on criminal legal aid and the need for more support for practitioners. I ask him to listen to the Law Society and Bar Council’s call to fast-track the criminal legal aid review, particularly on legal aid fees, and promise the significant investment in the criminal justice system that is desperately sought. Post the implementation of LASPO, there was also a promise to look at the pilots for early legal advice in civil legal aid by autumn 2019. That is way behind and we very much need to see it take place now.

As the Secret Barrister puts it:

“Without legal aid, without access to the knowledge and the skills by which we can enforce our rights, we are voiceless.”

It is therefore up to us to ensure that those voices are heard.