Legal Aid, Sentencing and Punishment of Offenders Bill

Baroness Howe of Idlicote Excerpts

Monday 16th January 2012 Lords Chamber

[Lord Phillips of Sudbury]

I am most grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Bach. There are 7,500 pages, and the devil of it is that a lot of these statutes interrelate. In many cases, finding a way through this stuff is, believe me, a job for a lawyer and not a job for the harassed citizen. Do not let us be carried away by the telephone helpline. It will help in all sorts of cases but in very many it will not. That is because, first, the complexity will outrun the knowledge of the person on the phone. Of course, the answer is that they should then refer the person to someone else, but I have to tell your Lordships that these advice lines—and I have experience of them too—are very powerful instruments. The second reason is that it is a commonplace that people find it very difficult to explain the facts and so on in relation to these social security measures face to face, let alone down a telephone line.

Therefore, I hope that we will be honest with ourselves and that the excellent civil servants, the excellent Bill team and the excellent Front Bench spokesmen will recognise that this is not territory with which we are familiar. I suggest that we need to be a little humble before we say categorically that the status quo after the Bill comes into force will be sufficient to enable hard-pressed, often bemused and sometimes desperate people to access the benefits that we have legislated for them.

[Baroness Howe of Idlicote]

My Lords, let us face it, the next group of amendments covers almost exactly the same area as this one. I shall reserve what I was going to say until we reach my amendment in that group. However, in view of the comments made by my noble friend Lord Wigley about running all these Bills together simultaneously, I wanted to point out that—believe it or not—in the Moses Room this afternoon, going on in parallel with what was going on in this Chamber there was a Motion about jobseeker’s allowance. Aspects of the Welfare Reform Bill and the legal aid Bill are interwoven in an appallingly complex way.

We have just heard from the noble Lord, Lord Phillips, a very clear case as to why the whole exercise is going to be costly. I agree with the sympathetic point he was making for the Government: any change made to these forms of welfare help is almost by definition bound to involve extra cost and extra complexity, because it is yet another layer added to the thousands of pages that have to be understood by the professional expert. Then, one appears to be busily taking away, or making it much less easy to access, the professional help we have had in the past. There is also the point made that the CABs, which have been so marvellous in the past, are going to be shorter and shorter of money. The whole thing is becoming really worrying and I hope that the Government will reflect on this.

[Lord Howarth of Newport]

My Lords, like my noble friend Lady Lister, I often feel that after the noble Lord, Lord Newton of Braintree, has spoken, there is not very much to add. However, all noble Lords who have subsequently spoken have indeed made very valuable additional contributions. I would like to say a few words because this is a debate of absolutely central importance in our consideration of the Bill. We should all be extremely grateful to the noble Baroness, Lady Doocey, for moving as she did the amendment that she and colleagues have tabled. She raised an interesting and important point—among many others. Since such a high proportion of those who receive legal aid to support them in welfare benefits cases are disabled people, this policy may be in effect discriminatory against disabled people. That in itself is something that we ought to reflect upon. I hope that when the Minister replies he will be able to tell us whether or not this is the case, and if he thinks it is not the case, how he explains that.

The noble Baroness also reminded us of the high success rate of appeals and of appeals made by disabled people. Of course, the proportion of successful appeals is higher when people have been advised, when people appear personally in court, and when they are accompanied. If the Government are going to take away legal aid from welfare benefits cases, it raises the question of whether they want people who are entitled to receive benefits to do so. I believe that they do. I cannot believe that the Liberal Democrats and the Conservative Party do not want people who are genuinely and properly entitled to receive welfare benefits to do so. However, the reality is that if they take away legal aid in support of those cases, they are ineluctably going to prevent very significant numbers of people who should receive those benefits from doing so. I ask them fairly and squarely this question, and again I would like the Minister to respond specifically to this point: do they want all these people to receive benefits, and if they do, how do they suppose that they are going to receive those benefits?

Ministers at the Ministry of Justice have been pretty blunt hitherto in saying that they consider welfare benefits cases to be of lower importance than other categories of case which will continue to be in scope of legal aid. I would like to know—and again I ask the Minister to tell us in his reply—exactly why the Government believe that welfare benefits cases are less important than other categories of cases that they have determined should remain eligible for legal aid. I think that for people in poverty, welfare benefits are extremely important, and those people would be interested to know the Government’s explanation of their policy, just as we would be.

Of course, there are going to be growing numbers of these people. This is partly because of the recession, which is increasing unemployment and the hazards of life, and making much, much more difficult the personal, domestic, and financial circumstances of very many people. There is also going to be an increased number of people who wish to appeal against decisions that they should not receive welfare benefits, on account of the transition to the new incapacity benefit, employment support allowance, personal independence payments, and the whole panoply of welfare reform upon which the Government have embarked. This is undoubtedly going to lead to confusion, to administrative complexity, and to a higher error rate on the part of staff whose job it is to determine eligibility for welfare benefits. We are going to see an increasing number of appeals that people will very properly want to be able to make. The Government therefore need to have very good reasons indeed for why they are going to make it harder for people to pursue these appeals successfully. After all, they are expecting, by their own admission, to make savings to the public purse of only some £25 million net—a trivial saving, absolutely trivial, in the context of overall public spending.

What is going to happen to these people who do not get legal aid? They will try to go to other sources of advice, but the charities which might advise them are not going to be in a position to do so, as they have been telling us. The citizens advice bureaux in particular have been warning us very earnestly that they will not be in a position to provide the advice that they have been able to provide with the support of legal aid and local authority funding—neither of those, in large part, are going to be available. Would-be appellants—claimants—may then be driven to other kinds of private adviser. I dread to think what sort of advice they may receive from those sources. We are very aware in the immigration field that some extremely dodgy and dubious people offer advice who are frankly exploitative of people when they are in very great difficulties.

We will see an increase in self-representation: people will go to the tribunals to try and make their own case. The notion, to which the Government are so attached, that the tribunal system is a user-friendly, accessible, informal alternative to the court system, is a pipe dream. Of course it is highly desirable that there be more informal, more economical, more user-friendly systems of justice available. Again and again, attempts have been made to achieve that but, again and again, the system becomes less informal, more complex and more arduous to navigate, and people need expert help to find their way through. It is unrealistic of the Government to suggest that the tribunals system is somehow going to be there and that it will be all right for people to represent themselves.

The consequences of a policy that will result in people not being able to make their appeals in order to obtain the benefits that they should be able to obtain will include increased unemployment, particularly among disabled people, because if they do not have the tailored support that they ought to have, their chances of securing employment, with the odds already stacked against them because of their disabilities and in this very difficult labour market, will be further reduced. We will find more people in debt and suffering ill health, because poverty will mean that people will not be able to afford a proper diet or heating and will have to cope with anxiety about their poverty. We will see more cases of poor physical and mental health. All these predicaments will produce costs to other government departments. I fear that we will also see a greater resort to criminality as people despair and feel that there is no longer a just system available to them. I do not think that there will be savings to the public purse; there will be additional costs to the public purse. Above all there will be a great cost for all of us to pay in national shame.