Legal aid

Chris Leslie Excerpts

Tuesday 14th December 2010 Westminster Hall

[Ms Buck]

My right hon. Friend makes a good point. It is true that legal aid practitioners who take on institutions in the public sector, and sometimes the private sector, are significantly less well paid than those professionals who make the public policy decisions that they challenge.

It is important to put on the record the fact that the previous Labour Government took decisions that bore down on legal aid expenditure. Not everyone will have agreed with those decisions—they may have challenged them—but there was a healthy debate. It must also be accepted that had Labour been re-elected, there would have been cuts in the legal aid budget. It is not the case, however, that the unfolding policy of the Labour party would have placed the pressure, which we now see emerging, on civil, family and social welfare law. Those are the areas of concern that I want to address.

It is critical to protect criminal legal aid. If it is not available at the right level and provided by quality professionals, justice will be denied. It is very important to protect a proper criminal legal aid budget. I pay tribute to Lord Bach, the former Minister with responsibility for legal aid, who looked at ways in which to bear down on exceptional costs in the criminal legal aid budget without sacrificing the principles of access to justice. I think there was consensus on that.

My concerns are about the manner in which the legal aid Green Paper attacks—and it is an attack—the legal aid budget. It bears down particularly severely on civil cases, including family and social welfare, and takes a number of areas out of the scope of aid entirely. Such areas include children and family cases in which domestic violence is not a stated factor, education, immigration where a person is not detained, clinical negligence, welfare benefits, employment, debt and some areas of housing. As a consequence, more than 500,000 people each year are less likely to receive help. Not only will that have an effect on those people unable to access legal aid services, but it will destabilise and possibly destroy such services in many areas and make it extremely hard for public services to be held to account when they are at fault.

[Chris Leslie (Nottingham East) (Lab/Co-op)]

My hon. Friend makes her case powerfully. The cuts are atrociously harsh on civil cases. Nottingham law centre in my constituency says that last year it helped 1,300 people avoid housing repossession. I am exceptionally worried about the impact on homelessness and the potential for people to lose their homes. This is important stuff.

[Ms Buck]

I am grateful to my hon. Friend for raising that point and I will return in a moment to the issue of housing and homelessness.

Funding for judicial review is retained within the legal aid Green Paper. However, in many cases it is not based upon the legal help that allows for an effective judicial review. I have been told that retaining judicial review but withdrawing so much legal aid is as useful as having a flight of stairs between the first and second floors of a building when there is nothing between the ground floor and the first. Judicial review emerges from a wider pool of cases and there will be inadequate tests of the law if legal aid is withdrawn.

As we know from the Green Paper, eligibility for legal aid is to be further reduced. Over recent years—this is already a trend—the proportion of the population eligible for legal aid on a sliding scale of contributions has fallen from about half of the population to about a third. The Green Paper further lowers the level at which people are asked to contribute from their assets, and increases the percentage level of contributions from earnings. Moreover, for the first time, those on social security benefits should, it is suggested, be subject to a full asset test. Will the Minister write to me and state whether the Department has calculated the cost of such an exercise? Taken together, all those measures prompt the question of whether even those who are potentially entitled to legal aid can afford to take up that entitlement, and what that will mean for access to justice.

Members of the public are being asked to insure themselves to cover future legal aid cases. However, since those who lose out are, overwhelmingly, low-income households, it is extremely unlikely that they will be able to find money for a hypothetical eventuality, rather than for the daily struggle to house, heat and feed themselves. There is nothing wrong with taking out insurance in principle—it should be encouraged—but is it realistic to ask low-income groups to insure against eventualities that are simply not as foreseeable as those risks that lead people to insure their homes and cars?

The loss of legal aid will mean that most, if not all, of the 500,000 people affected will lose access to advice and representation. That figure will include many of the most vulnerable categories of people. The legal aid consultation itself acknowledges that in respect of issues such as debt, welfare benefits and education, people with disabilities are likely to be disproportionately affected. For example, 63% of legally aided clients in the sphere of welfare benefits assistance are disabled.

The excellent briefing produced for this debate by the National Association of Citizens Advice Bureaux states that

“alternative sources of advice are simply not available, suitable or accessible for the overwhelming majority of our client group”

and

“the voluntary sector and pro bono does not have the capacity to fulfil the need currently met by Legal Aid in terms of the volume of people or the specialism required for more complex cases.”

Will the Minister say, either now or later, whether the Department has carried out a full capacity assessment to assure us that voluntary and pro bono facilities are available to fill the gap that will be created by the proposals in the Green Paper?