Legal Aid Reform

Greg Mulholland Excerpts

Thursday 27th June 2013 Commons Chamber

[Ian Swales]

The hon. Gentleman has made his point fluently. I am not a lawyer and am unable to comment on those details, but I am sure that Ministers heard his point.

Looking at the effect on justice first, the evidence from the USA, where the MOJ’s planned approach is already in place, will give the public little comfort. Even people who are charged with the most serious crimes, including murder, are given low-cost lawyers and scant attention. Among the most serious duties a Government can have are to prevent people from dying in hospital and to prevent them from being wrongfully imprisoned. Why do we believe so strongly in choice in the first case while seeking to eliminate it in the second? Only through choice can standards be maintained and competitive pressures take effect. Yesterday, the Chancellor said:

“Our philosophy is simple: trust people to make their own decisions and they will usually make better decisions.”—[Official Report, 26 June 2013; Vol. 565, c. 306.]

I urge the Minister to follow that approach.

I also urge the Minister to look carefully at the financial incentives in the proposed contracts. As we on the Public Accounts Committee know, there is touching faith in most Departments that their private sector partners will “do the right thing”. They will—but it will be the right thing to maximise their profits. It beggars belief that firms might get the same fee for a quick guilty plea as they get for a trial lasting days or even weeks. I know that the Secretary of State is a great believer in payment by results, but is he really looking for justice through short trials with few witnesses, or for innocent, vulnerable people to be locked up through a quick guilty plea? That is what his system will encourage.

[Greg Mulholland (Leeds North West) (LD)]

Does my hon. Friend acknowledge the serious concern that there will be an incentive for legal representatives to encourage clients to plead guilty, because the fee will be the same? That is deeply worrying.

[Ian Swales]

I agree with my hon. Friend. I repeat: private companies will seek to maximise their profits. I advise anyone who doubts that to check the financial incentives in the GP out-of-hours contracts and then look at what has happened to the number of people attending hospital accident and emergency centres.

I will now deal with contracting. This time last week, I was in Westminster Hall discussing the court translation services debacle—a true horror story. The response from the Under-Secretary of State for Justice, the hon. Member for Maidstone and The Weald (Mrs Grant), showed breathtaking complacency about the overall effect on and cost to the courts system. She even seemed to be content with a present failure rate that is five times greater than the one contracted for. In addition, as has been noted, early results coming in on the new civil legal aid arrangements show more court cases, not fewer, and many cases doubling in length owing to inadequate representation. Again, I ask whether the Ministry is counting the full costs.

The most lucrative business in this country now seems to be winning Government bidding rounds, then—ideally—selling the contract for a quick profit, as we saw with the court translation service, or taking fat fees and getting other people to do the work, as we see in the Work programme.

--- Later in debate ---

[Greg Mulholland (Leeds North West) (LD)]

I will keep my comments brief. As the mood of the House has made clear, there is an acceptance across the Chamber that reform is necessary and cost savings must be found in the legal aid budget, but there is an overwhelming view that although change may be necessary, the ones proposed are very clearly the wrong changes. Coalition colleagues have been keen to point out from the Conservative Benches that in their opinion this is not a Conservative reform and not one that they can support from their own philosophy. I understand and sympathise with that.

Let me say from the Liberal Democrat Benches that these changes are not liberal. They undermine the principles of liberal democracy and the justice system that is a key part of it. They threaten the liberal values of justice and fairness that our justice system should be based on. I am therefore saying clearly that as Liberal Democrats we should oppose them. As colleagues have said, we have already had substantial cuts to the legal aid budget through the Legal Aid, Sentencing and Punishment of Offenders Act 2012 and the lower fees built into the 2010 criminal legal aid contract.

I have further concerns, apart from the financial ones. My hon. Friend the Member for Redcar (Ian Swales), as a member of the Public Accounts Committee, has laid out the Committee’s concerns. I am a member of the other overseeing Committee, the Public Administration Committee, and we have already expressed our concerns that in a number of areas Government procurement does not sufficiently allow small and medium-sized enterprises to bid. Here we have something that the Government are doing which will make that difficult or impossible and will damage or destroy many small businesses. As Members have said, many of the high street solicitors are not fat cats. Many of them operate in the heart of communities, and that will be ripped away by the proposed changes. That seems to undermine a number of other Government initiatives, including the Portas review, for example.

In 2011 at the Liberal Democrat federal conference we passed a motion noting that those least advantaged in society are often those who most need assistance in getting access to the courts and to legal aid, and that fair access to justice and to the courts is a mark of a modern, civilised and democratic society. The Liberal Democrat party as a whole therefore agreed that before any substantial changes are made to the legal system, full consideration, assessment and trials should be carried out, which is not the case at present.

Liberal Democrat lawyers have come up with a number of proposals to show that there are different ways of achieving the same aims. These proposals are worthy of consideration, and I hope the Government will consider them. They include lifting the bar on assets subject to a criminal restraint order from being used to fund reasonable legal expenses; removing long and complex fraud cases entirely from the scope of legal aid and instead requiring company directors to take out insurance against the costs of defending in prosecutions arising out of the conduct of their company; the use of penalties which could reimburse legal aid against the Crown Prosecution Service where prosecution conduct leads to wasted costs, long trial extensions and so on; a strategy for decriminalising minor offences and reducing the use of custody through restorative justice alternatives; and making savings from the administrative budget.

Liberal Democrat lawyers oppose the proposed changes and the Liberal Democrat party as a whole opposes the changes. I believe that the Liberal Democrat parliamentary party should oppose those changes, and that is the message that I want to send today.