Legal Aid Reform

Ben Bradshaw Excerpts

Thursday 3rd February 2011 Commons Chamber

[Mr Ben Bradshaw (Exeter) (Lab)]

I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Makerfield (Yvonne Fovargue) on securing this important debate and commend her for her excellent speech.

Given the welcome fact that so many Members want to contribute, I will confine my remarks to the impact of the Government’s proposals on my local citizens advice bureau in Exeter, whereby it would lose all its welfare benefits funding, and funding for debt cases would be restricted to instances where there is an “immediate risk” of homelessness. Taken together, my CAB estimates that the changes will affect up to 700 cases a year in Exeter alone. The director of Exeter CAB, Steve Barriball, has described as “perverse” the fact that the Government are proposing to fund debt advice only when the client faces an immediate risk of homelessness. He says:

“It is widely accepted that timely intervention is more productive and reduces costs elsewhere, such as County Court repossession and other action.”

As other Members have said, these changes represent a terrible false economy, and in the case of Exeter they come at the same time as the local authority, Devon county council, is proposing to cut its support to the CAB by a massive 20%, as part of its attempt to grapple with a 27% reduction in funding from central Government. Yet it is estimated that for every pound of public money spent on CAB services, the CAB saves the public purse £12.20.

[Mr Pat McFadden (Wolverhampton South East) (Lab)]

I appreciate what my right hon. Friend is saying about his local citizens advice bureau. In Wolverhampton, the citizens advice bureau handles some 1,600 cases a year that are funded by such help, involving 26 employees. The local director has said:

“The CAB would effectively go back 20 years in its development”

if the current proposals go through. In response to the hon. Member for Carshalton and Wallington (Tom Brake), who spoke a few moments ago, would my right hon. Friend care to contrast those proposals with the record of the Labour Government, who increased the funding to citizens advice bureaux when the recession was coming, precisely because we knew that there would be a greater need for debt advice as economic times got tough?

[Mr Bradshaw]

My right hon. Friend is exactly right. Indeed, I was about to make the point—gently, I hope—to the hon. Members for Broxtowe (Anna Soubry) and for Carshalton and Wallington (Tom Brake) that it is not good enough for Government Members to excuse every cut that this Government are implementing by talking about the need for fiscal consolidation. There is a clear choice to be made about the speed and degree of fiscal consolidation, and there is growing evidence that the speed and degree of fiscal consolidation being pursued by this Government is not only damaging important services such as the CAB, but damaging our economic recovery. All hon. Members need to do—

[Rehman Chishti]

rose—

[Mr Bradshaw]

No, sit down.

All hon. Members need to do is look across the Atlantic at the example of the United States under Barack Obama, who is pursuing a Keynesian economic policy, like the one that we advocate, where growth was 3.5% in the last quarter, as opposed to a 0.5% contraction here. So please, let us have no more lectures from Government Members about there being no alternative to these savage cuts.

For all the Government’s rhetoric about the big society, the CAB is the big society in action. It is staffed mainly by volunteers, helping everyone, and in particular the vulnerable, and saves the state millions of pounds in the process by ensuring that people in difficulty do not fall into crisis, the fallout from which the state then has to pick up. The Government’s proposed changes to legal aid and their impact on the work of CABs such as mine in Exeter will have a deeply damaging impact on the fabric of our communities and will cost us all far more in the long term. I therefore urge the Government to think again about this short-sighted and false economy.