Sentencing Reform/Legal Aid

Gerald Kaufman Excerpts

Tuesday 21st June 2011 Commons Chamber

[Mr Clarke]

I agree with the right hon. Gentleman. Talking tough is easy and most politicians do it; delivering tough is rather difficult, as the Labour party discovered only too often. I will not use the quotes I have used before—the right hon. Gentleman knows them perfectly well. I agree that prison is of course the right punishment for serious and violent offenders, who will keep being sent there for long sentences whenever that punishment is justified, so that they can make reparation. However, we also tackle crime by trying to reform them, getting more of them to go straight, reducing reoffending and finding other ways of stopping the accumulation of more victims and more crimes committed by people coming through the system. I think that that is accepted by my colleagues. We are giving up the remorseless and hugely expensive increases in the prison population, and looking for a more intelligent way of protecting the public, which is our principal priority.

[Sir Gerald Kaufman (Manchester, Gorton) (Lab)]

Is the right hon. and learned Gentleman aware—he certainly should be because I have told him a number of times—of the dire effect upon my constituents of the action he has taken already in attacking citizens advice bureaux, undermining legal aid and taking the wrecking ball to the South Manchester law centre? Is he further aware that what he has announced today will complete the process of making access to justice a prerogative of the rich?

[Mr Clarke]

I could answer each of those three things. Most of the cuts being made to citizens advice bureaux and so on are being made by local government; we are not the principal—[Interruption.] The Ministry of Justice is not the principal contributor to citizens advice bureaux. However, as I have already said, the Government as a whole will assist those who give quality, worthwhile advice of the kind required by the very many people who do not need legal aid and an adversarial lawyer, which is not the best way of proceeding.

We have debated court closures before. We inherited more than 100 underused buildings, which I am afraid we had to tackle and rationalise. Our package of legal aid reforms is tackling a system that has become bloated in recent years—a system that the right hon. Gentleman’s Government kept talking about reforming but never did, because an inability to take decisions about exactly what to do about an out-of-control Government was rather typical under the last Prime Minister. When we have finished what the right hon. Gentleman says are draconian reforms, we will still have by far the most expensive legal aid system in the world after I have made our so-called cuts.