Legal Aid, Sentencing and Punishment of Offenders Bill

Baroness Hollis of Heigham Excerpts

Monday 5th March 2012 Lords Chamber

[Lord Howarth of Newport]

My Lords, I have been encouraged so fulsomely by the Minister that I rise to contribute briefly to this debate and to support my noble friend Lady Hayter of Kentish Town, who moved this amendment. She is right to draw our attention and, more importantly, the Government’s attention to the interaction between these two major pieces of legislation—this legal aid legislation and the welfare reform legislation—because they combine to impact in major ways on the fortunes, perhaps I should rather say the misfortunes, of people who are poor and disadvantaged. The Government have a responsibility to look to see what the combined effect may be, and I think what my noble friend has proposed—an independent review after a year—is entirely reasonable.

I would like to draw attention to paragraph (c) of my noble friend’s amendment. She wants the review to consider,

“the number and any increase in the welfare benefit cases that are made or referred to … parliamentary constituency offices”.

There is no doubt that the case load of Members of Parliament in their constituency offices will increase. People who do not know where to turn for remedy will look around and think that they must at least go to their Member of Parliament to see what he or she can do to help. Members of Parliament will be extremely willing to do what they can, but most of them will certainly not be in a position to give legal advice, and I rather suspect that Members of Parliament who are lawyers will be reluctant to give advice in their capacity as lawyers to constituents who come to them at their constituency offices.

Members of Parliament listen to what their constituents have to say and give them the best practical advice they can. They will take up the case for them or refer them to the Minister or to other appropriate agencies, but there is a very strict limit to what Members of Parliament can do to sort out such problems on behalf of their constituents. I think we need to recognise that, and also that IPSA has pretty drastically squeezed the resources available to Members of Parliament. If the workload of MPs is going to rise, one very relevant consideration is just what resources will be available to MPs to help their constituents. Equally, local authorities face reductions in their funding of some 30 per cent over the spending review period, and so will be less well placed than they would wish to support local people who find themselves in difficulties.

For example, local people with housing problems may have a complaint about their landlord; the landlord is not keeping their accommodation in proper condition. People will no longer have access to legal aid to enable them to sort out these problems. They might turn to the environmental health officer but the environmental health officer may take a very long time before he or she can get around to their case.

The “other prescribed agencies” that my noble friend mentions in her amendment are presumably charitable organisations; we talked about that earlier. The Government’s reduction to local authority funding is having a major knock-on impact on the funding that local authorities are able to provide for charitable bodies in their areas, including law centres and citizens advice bureaux. The effect of the recession is also squeezing the amount of income that is available to those agencies.

My noble friend does well to draw attention to some of these realities and I hope the Government will accept that there are problems here that they ought to review in the kind of way that my noble friend’s amendment proposes.

[Baroness Hollis of Heigham]

My Lords, I hope noble Lords will forgive me if I come in on an amendment that is rather dear to my heart, after the powerful speech by my noble friend Lady Hayter, because we both worked on the Welfare Reform Bill.

What struck me in that particular debate on the Welfare Reform Bill was that it is surely folly to withdraw legal advice at the time that you are bedding in a new system of welfare benefits, which will probably have greater effect on claimants than anything since the Second World War. I do not know whether I have the Minister’s attention but perhaps I could suggest to him that the one thing you do not do is withdraw legal advice about entitlement and eligibility at the very same time that you are introducing a major, vast set of changes to benefits.

As my noble friend Lady Hayter indicated, in discussions on the Welfare Reform Bill, the Minister, the noble Lord, Lord Freud, who had genuine respect for evidence, agreed to accept three major reviews post-implementation of the Bill: first, what would happen to private sector rented housing; secondly, what would happen to public sector rented housing; and thirdly, what would happen to disabled children. This is in respect of being informed by evidence and seeing what the effect of changes will be.

The Government are taking a leap into the dark on the Welfare Reform Bill and a leap into the dark on withdrawing the ability to seek legal advice at the time claimants are most likely to need it. At the very least, therefore, the Minister should follow in the footsteps of his noble friend Lord Freud and put in the basic safety net of a review to see whether the Government’s expectations will be fulfilled.

[Lord McNally]

My Lords, it is always a pleasure to have an intervention from the noble Baroness, Lady Hollis. I hear what she says and of course I defer to the judgment of my noble friend Lord Freud about the Welfare Reform Bill. However, if she had been with us through the passage of this Bill, she would have seen the number of pre-legislative and post-legislative inquiries, independent reports, consultations—it does seem a little bit like overkill.

The noble Baroness, Lady Hayter, has confessed that this is a second go at this issue, previously raised without success in the Welfare Reform Bill. This time around she would require the Lord Chancellor to conduct a review of the combined effects of Part 1 and what is now the Welfare Reform Act on a range of measures relating to advice provision and demand for advice.