Public Legal Education

Eddie Hughes Excerpts

Tuesday 15th May 2018 Westminster Hall

[Eddie Hughes (Walsall North) (Con)]

It is a pleasure to speak under your chairmanship, Mr Pritchard. I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for North East Hampshire (Mr Jayawardena), partly because this debate has been an education for me. When I was growing up, as the son of a bus driver, in a typical Irish community in Birmingham, I aspired to be a JCB driver, largely because the people I saw around me were involved in construction of some sort and it is easy to aspire to be something that we can see.

I managed to spend a considerable portion of my life without interacting with lawyers of any sort, and when I did, I saw that largely as a negative thing. When I was purchasing a house, I clearly needed to use the services of a conveyancing solicitor. Once we have settled on a house that we think we can afford to buy, all of a sudden there are additional costs that need to be built into that model, so the cost increases and I think, “Oh my god, I have had to pay for this service that I didn’t think I needed and I have paid what felt like an unreasonable fee for it, and these posh lawyers are the people who benefit from it.” Little did I know that although good legal advice is expensive, bad legal advice can be very expensive. Only later did I come to appreciate just how brilliant some people in the legal profession can be, and just how necessary.

The next time that I engaged with solicitors was perhaps even less fortunate—it was when I was getting divorced. Again, the process seemed to cost me considerably more money than I had thought it would. It was an already perilous position to be in, but I needed to engage lawyers at least to mitigate the loss that I was experiencing. My point is that, clearly, if people do not engage with the law and solicitors except at a time when they are absolutely necessary to them in order to navigate life, their experience of them might be fairly negative.

Why do I make this introduction? I do so because I believe that I am the Conservative MP who represents the most deprived constituency represented by a Conservative MP. I believe that approximately 25% of my constituents do not have a passport. They certainly do not have high levels of education and they will definitely not be meeting solicitors or other legal professionals as a matter of course, so the law is, I imagine, probably something for them to fear. If people do not know it, do not understand it and are not aware of what their obligations are under it, life is likely to be all the more difficult, so for me, part of the reason for being excited about the concept of public legal education is the opportunity that it will give me, as an MP, to enhance my engagement with schools in my constituency and also, hopefully, to engage with legal practices in Walsall and give them the opportunity to come into schools and educate young people.

The reason for that is twofold. First, if people are introduced to the law and legal professionals and become more familiar with them, their greater understanding will allow them, I hope, to navigate the law more easily on their own and, should they need to engage professional legal services, they are likely to be better informed as to where to find them. Secondly, and perhaps more importantly, is the idea that schools interacting with legal firms will give young people, particularly those in my constituency, the opportunity to aspire to be something brilliant.

Since I have become more engaged with lawyers—let us face it: an awful lot of them end up becoming MPs—I have developed greater respect for the profession. We do not see them as people who are just going to take our money off us; they are actually nice people, deep down inside, and very useful. Many of them have great careers. What a unique thing for people in my constituency to aspire to.

Before I came to the Chamber this afternoon, I was speaking to some people from Lloyds Banking Group about a programme called Women in the Real Economy. The idea is that 10 MPs will be mentoring young people —young women—who otherwise would not have access to the networks and opportunities that might be naturally available to more middle-class families. What a great programme that is. We will be working in pairs—it will be me and a representative from Lloyds bank—to help those young women to develop skills and talents that they might not otherwise have the opportunity to develop. How great, then, that the timely arrival of this debate means that I have learned from my hon. Friend the Member for North East Hampshire about a number of the programmes that are available to schools and that I can engage some of those young women in them, so that they not only can aspire to great careers in professional commerce—as they might do through Lloyds Banking Group—but can be given some introduction to the law and perhaps, therefore, go on to pursue a career in law in future.

I wholly endorse the concept of the programme under discussion—the idea that we might educate people sooner and quicker. Young people will not be frightened of the law, but will have a grounding in it and a basic understanding of it and their obligations under it, but more importantly for me, the idea that some of them may go on to aspire to become legal professionals in the future is a great endorsement of this programme.