Criminal Legal Aid (General) (Amendment) Regulations 2013

Earl of Sandwich Excerpts

Wednesday 29th January 2014 Lords Chamber

Is this really what the Government intended when they forced the Legal Aid, Sentencing and Punishment of Offenders Act through Parliament? If it was, it does them no credit. They are gradually destroying a civilised system of access to justice—one that was far from perfect but which worked in practice and was, frankly, not very expensive. In its place is emerging a world where the poorest and those without any power, including of course prisoners under this particular regulation, have nowhere to go to get the legal advice that they deserve and need. It is fast becoming a record to be ashamed of.

[The Earl of Sandwich (CB)]

My Lords, I am extremely honoured to be in this learned company and I will try not to take too much time because everything has been said.

We have been here before. I spoke in the debate of the noble Baroness, Lady Deech, as did many other noble Lords. On that occasion, I mentioned the work of the CAB. But today, like others, I am much more concerned about the effect of these regulations on young people in difficulty, including asylum seekers in detention, unaccompanied minors and even young people released from prison and wishing to make a new life. These young people would normally benefit from professional legal advice at a critical stage in their lives when they are separated from their families or being made homeless at the moment of leaving prison. Specialised agencies such as the Howard League mentioned by the noble Lord, Lord Carlile, have given hundreds of people not just hope but essential practical advice on restarting their lives. This kind of work, as the noble Lord, Lord Ramsbotham, said, characterises fairness in our society. It is not charity.

I notice that the Minister has been a member of the Select Committee looking at mental capacity, so he will be more aware than most of the special problems of the mentally ill already mentioned. Many of those people are in prison through no fault of their own. I said in the legal aid debate that those with mental health problems were especially vulnerable. There were no exceptions for children nor for prisoners accepted to have a disability. A detained child unable to identify legal issues will not have the financial resources, let alone the intellectual resources, to pay for lawyers or even to frame their complaint to the prison authority, as is suggested. That is a serious point that the Minister has to answer. It would be a serious personal crisis for young people.

A case of a 12 year-old boy was mentioned to me by the Howard League. He was an unaccompanied minor who had been detained in a secure children’s home. He had behaved well, earned himself early release and had sought help with resettlement. The lawyer concerned approached social services but only then discovered through an interpreter that he had been wrongly detained in the first place and had to appeal against his sentence. None of this will happen if cases are not referred in the future and legal aid is unavailable.

Last September, there were 1,789 immigration detainees spread across the UK in removal centres and short-term holding facilities simply waiting to be removed. Many are moved from place to place and I doubt if the Minister or anyone else can keep count of how many of them are young people. I heard from a Member of Parliament last week that one young detainee, originally from his constituency, had been moved eight times. Mental health problems loom large in these situations because no one knows when they can leave or even when they can receive a hearing. Detainees depend heavily on outside advice. This may be a subject for the Immigration Bill next month, but it is surely highly relevant to the present regulations. Is it fair to exact cuts that will impinge on young people in these conditions and restrict their lives even more than at present?

It is true that the Joint Committee on Human Rights accepted that it was legitimate for the Government to introduce a residence test, as the Minister may mention, and to restrict the scope of prison law funding. But it strongly recommended that there should be more and broader exemptions from these proposals to make it less likely that they will lead to breaches of the fundamental right of effective access to justice.

What is especially unfortunate, as the noble Lord, Lord Pannick, mentioned, is that young people in prison had been receiving much better attention over a long period. For example, the Minister will know that in 2002 there was a court ruling that the welfare and child protection duties in the Children Act apply to children in prison just as they do to children in the community.

The amount and percentage of cuts has already been discussed. They are surely disproportionate. I shall lastly mention one piece of evidence given to the Select Committee last July. I was surprised to read that the Justice Secretary had changed his mind about equal shares in legal aid work. He told the committee he had been persuaded that competition among legal providers was more essential than advice shared equally. He said:

“That is something that the market has said to me: ‘Actually, the principle of choice is one that we regard as more important’”,

than equal shares. If the market is speaking in this way, many young people and their families are going to suffer from these regulations.

[Baroness Hamwee (LD)]

My Lords, the noble Earl mentioned the debate in this House last July. I looked back at that and reminded myself that the title of the Motion of the noble Baroness, Lady Deech, was “Effect of Cuts in Legal Aid Funding on the Justice System of England and Wales”. I think that that was a very well chosen title because the effect of the cuts is not just on individuals but on our system of justice.

I was not going to talk about whether this was a matter of ideology on the part of the Justice Secretary. I had a look at the transcript and am not sure that that was quite the exchange about ideological differences, but I am tempted to wonder whether that was an admission or a boast.

I want to say very clearly—though noble and learned Lords, and noble Lords who are not technically learned, have put it much better than I can—that for those who are convicted and sentenced by the courts, the punishment is imprisonment. The punishment should not extend to the loss of rights, whether convention rights or at common law.

A number of threads seem to run through the Government’s approach. The first is a reference to and reliance on judicial review. I do not need to comment on the paradox in that given the policy regarding judicial review. I was not aware of the Daily Mail article quoted by the noble and learned Lord, Lord Goldsmith. I do not think that I need to spend any time on saying how undesirable it is to rely on judicial review. But I will mention the skill that is needed, at what I shall describe as first instance, to ensure that the right points are raised and dealt with in order that there is a basis for an application for judicial review. I think that that is not a job for someone who is not trained.

Another theme which I picked up from the JCHR report is that the Justice Secretary thinks that the number of cases affected will be very small. If that is so, I do not understand why the Government do not give in gracefully. We know about the cost pressures on the MoJ. We know that the Government want to focus public resources on cases with sufficient priority to justify the use of public money and to get value for money for the taxpayer. But I know that I am not alone in this Chamber in setting justice high in my priorities as a taxpayer.

What seems to be a common theme in the responses to the Government from those who work in the sector is a mention of the “see-saw impact”—that is, cuts here meaning costs there. Concerns around mother and baby units and the cost of keeping a baby in care is one example, undermining the principles of rehabilitation and the costs associated with all that. We will all have seen and read particular cases. I shall mention one which I found very compelling—the story of a 17 year-old who was given a 36-month custodial sentence. He was studying for his A-levels at the time. With the work of solicitors, who engaged in both detailed representations and liaison with a clutch of agencies, he was granted release on temporary licence to attend college part-time and then home detention curfew, and so he lost only one year of education, not the further years which were in prospect.

Of course, there is also the cost of the loss of expertise among solicitors. I have seen, and heard about tonight, a large number of points relating to costs rather than savings. We really have not got any better, have we, at joining up and reading across budgets? I have actually been defeated—my level of energy depleted—in trying to understand the savings projected as against the knock-on costs. I hope that when the Minister—who has everyone’s sympathy in this—replies he will be able to unpack this for the House.

The third theme I picked up was the emphasis on the non-judicial complaints system. I do not see this as an either/or. There should be a good complaints system. That should then alleviate to some extent the necessity for lawyers to be involved. There should be an effective system that inspires confidence. However, there are limits to the system that we have—to the powers, to the remit, which does not extend to making recommendations to external agencies or investigating them. These concerns seem rightly to have been stressed.

We have heard, although not tonight, about ambulance chasing—if that is the right term—by some solicitors in prison, soliciting work and planting the idea in prisoners’ minds that they have real claims. However, that should not mean that proper advice, assistance and representation is not available.

I do not suppose that the MoJ has found much which it regarded as supportive or constructive in the responses to the proposed changes. The House has managed to cover quite a lot of ground, and I will end by citing a point made by the Council of Her Majesty’s Circuit Judges, which noted, according to the Howard League, that:

“The practice of prison law is so unique; its impact on the most vulnerable within society so profound; and the potential savings suggested by these reforms so limited at best, and so obscure in any event, prison law should be removed altogether from the scope of the legal aid reforms”.