Legal Aid Reform

Catherine McKinnell Excerpts

Thursday 27th June 2013 Commons Chamber

[Catherine McKinnell (Newcastle upon Tyne North) (Lab)]

My hon. Friend is making a powerful argument. In my area, since April the bedroom tax has increased arrears in the city already by £750,000, pushing more families into misery and making them more in need of the very advice to which she refers.

[Ms Buck]

My hon. Friend is absolutely right. It is another excellent example. I am sure that colleagues will have examples from a number of areas of service and from all over the country.

On the “Transforming Legal Aid” agenda, while it is true that a Labour Government would have faced difficult and not necessarily popular choices about the justice system and legal aid, one of the elements that we regard as critical is maintenance of the ability for the accused to have a choice of lawyers. There is a risk that the proposed changes will lead to a loss of specialist services and quality services driven by choice, and potentially to miscarriages of justice.

I want to share with the House a letter I received from one of my constituents in the run-up to today’s debate. It is from Anne Maguire, one of the Maguire Seven convicted in 1975 of possession of explosives together with her husband, two teenage sons, brother and brother-in-law and a family friend. She received a sentence of 14 years. She and all her relatives and friend were innocent and their convictions were quashed by the Court of Appeal in 1992. She says:

“Over many years, our solicitor Alastair Logan worked tirelessly without payment to overturn our wrongful convictions. Without his diligence and painstaking work, it’s no exaggeration that the miscarriage of justice we suffered would never have been put right. Under the government’s terrible proposals, solicitors’ firms such as Alastair’s would disappear to be replaced by a reduced number of large commercial operations with no interest in helping innocent prisoners.

Many more miscarriages of justice will occur if plans to award legal aid contracts to the cheapest commercial bidders such as the haulage company Eddie Stobart and to remove the ancient right of accused persons to choose their own lawyer are implemented.

I hope you'll attend the debate on Thursday”.

I am pleased to do that but also to join my colleagues in the vote.

I would love to be able to talk about the judicial review proposals and the accountability of public services that will be lost, but I want finally to touch on the issue of residency. As my parliamentary neighbour the hon. Member for Brent Central (Sarah Teather) has pointed out, urban constituencies such as ours with large migrant populations are most likely to feel the impact of the new residency qualifications. Those qualifications will have a particularly severe impact on children. I am indebted to a law company in my constituency called Just for Kids Law, which has raised with me its fears about the residency qualifications and the extent to which they will hit trafficked children and the children and families of victims of domestic violence, some of whom have come here on their husband’s visa. It will hit children and families of people who have come here to work in domestic service. This is something I am familiar with in my constituency and have many problems with. Finally, it will hit the babies and small children of British citizens who have been abroad and returned to this country, who will lose their qualification. That is a serious impact on the rights of children. I believe the measures must be resisted and look forward to joining colleagues in voting against them this afternoon.