Legal Aid: Birmingham Pub Bombings

Jess Phillips Excerpts

Tuesday 27th March 2018 Westminster Hall

[Jess Phillips (Birmingham, Yardley) (Lab)]

Thank you very much, Mr Hollobone. I thank my hon. Friend the Member for Birmingham, Northfield (Richard Burden) for a forensic trot-through of the problem that we face. I will not cover the same ground, but I associate myself with everything he said in laying out exactly how long we have been to-ing and fro-ing on this issue.

I feel as if I am on a merry-go-round. I have been on it for only about four or five years, from just before I was elected. I meet with the families regularly. They are in their 40th year of dealing with this issue, and I feel tired of having to bring it up once again. We have won this argument before, and we have been here before. They were refused legal aid at the inquest stage and there was a lot of hullabaloo from many of the same people who are in the Chamber today, from both parties. We won that argument, yet here we are again.

For me, the fundamental problem is inequality of arms. These people are ordinary citizens. It is not okay for the public bodies involved, whether they be police forces, Government Departments, or in this instance the coroner, to have a resource that is simply not available to the party that represents the victims. Not a single one of the families of the 21 people murdered on that night wishes to be in this position. They do not want to be any trouble and to have to constantly make these arguments. They wish, more than any of us, that we were not standing here having this debate. They wish that in a way that most of us in this place will never understand, although unfortunately some Members of the House do have personal experience in that regard. The fact that we are here again, with ordinary citizens feeling as though they were begging the state to allow them to be represented, is a source of deep sadness. I feel a bit tired by this constant battle, although having met the families I know that they are battle-weary but fairly tough.

I want to go over some of the reasons why legal aid, at this stage, has been refused, most recently to my constituent Margaret, who was the mother of one of the victims. Just to big up the women who come from my bit of the world, hon. Members will never meet a woman as tough, steely and certain as this woman. She makes me look like a wallflower.

[Stephen Pound (Ealing North) (Lab)]

Good God.

[Jess Phillips]

Yes—you can imagine. As her MP, I know what it is like to sometimes have to disappoint her. The fact is that as my hon. Friend the Member for Birmingham, Northfield outlined, the most recent round of legal aid has been endorsed by the coroner as the only fair way for justice to be served in the appeal process.

The reason given to the families for legal aid not being granted is that, despite the eligibility of one applicant, the other families cumulatively have sufficient resources to fund the legal action. I know these families. They are not rich people. They are ordinary people who live in ordinary houses. They are all extraordinary people in their own way, and in what they have been fighting, but they are not like the people we meet in this building. They are not people with thousands and thousands of pounds in the bank. They are ordinary people who perhaps own ordinary houses.

Are we saying, as the state, that if someone—a normal Joe or Jill—wants to seek justice, they will probably have to sell their house? That if someone’s family is murdered, in order for them to go through the process of getting justice we will take away all their assets? My constituent will also be judged on the assets of her children—we are going to strip away those assets because they want to go through the process. What they want is justice. Taking away their assets is not an acceptable standard for any of us here; I am certain that Government Members do not feel that it is. I wish that I could hold up photos of these people’s homes, so that hon. Members could see what ordinary lives they lead. They are ordinary Brummies.

[Dame Caroline Spelman]

The hon. Lady is making a very good point. There is an absurdity to any argument that justice should be means-tested, in the sense that property prices are so significantly different around the country that there is an in-built disadvantage for some parts of the country. I do not know whether the Minister knows what the average property price is in the west midlands, but the average home in the west midlands is sub-£200,000. Most people living in London could only dream of a house at that kind of level—they do not exist anywhere in London—so straight away there is an absurdity to the argument that a person’s principal home should be considered as part of a means test for achieving justice. It just is not right.

[Jess Phillips]

It certainly is not. I remember giving the figures on the day when the threshold for inheritance tax was raised to £375,000, when I stood up and told the Minister that, in my constituency, eight people would benefit from that, and they had to be dead. My husband said that that Budget day was a great day to be dead. That gives a bit of an idea of the property prices in the area that I represent and live in.

The second issue that my hon. Friend the Member for Birmingham, Northfield raised was the idea that because the families have previously been successful in raising funds themselves, they could probably lean back on that. To be clear, are we saying that if families, victims or anyone else wants to seek justice, the state currently feels that it should fall to those who can shake a tin best, or perhaps run a fun run? We could dress up as—I don’t know—victims, and do the London Marathon, and see how many people wanted to give us some cash so that we could find out some of the answers that the families have waited decades for. Even for those who do not know the families and do not have personal involvement, that cannot be a standard for our justice system. Crowdfunding and who can write the best tagline on a website and bleed the most hearts should not be the most likely way for people to access justice, going up against a state actor that is paid for by the same people’s taxes—we are the same people.

[Stephen Pound]

My hon. Friend will be aware that on 6 November 2014, Nils Muižnieks, the Council of Europe commissioner for human rights, addressed this issue. His ruling, which we signed up to and support, was:

“It is clear that budgetary cuts should not be used as an excuse to hamper the work of those working for justice.”

We as a nation support that. Should we not extend that to this horrendous case?

[Jess Phillips]

I could not agree more. There are probably endless quotes from the bishop who did the inquiry into the Hillsborough situation, and we will almost certainly face the exact same arguments when the Grenfell disaster eventually comes before inquiries, courts and inquests. This is not just about the families in Birmingham; it is about a standard of justice. It is a David and Goliath situation, where David is the one paying for Goliath. That cannot be right, yet these families, having already lost family members, are having to do the heavy lifting for the rest of us to have a better system. For that, on behalf of anybody who has ever gone up against a state actor, we owe a debt of gratitude to families such as the Justice for the 21 families and the Hillsborough families, who are doing this on behalf of all of us to make justice better and fairer.

I worry that the Legal Aid Agency is using its powers to make decisions on whether it grants funding based on the merits of a case, and is deciding that it has authority on those merits. A High Court judge has agreed that the review should take place. It is perfectly reasonable that the coroner feels they have the right to appeal against that decision—that is absolutely fine—but it is not acceptable for the Legal Aid Agency to decide on the merits of that case. Are we saying that in the very complicated hierarchy of justice that these ordinary people have had to learn—they could probably sit legal degrees with ease now, these ordinary people with ordinary jobs, who did not know anything about this—the Legal Aid Agency now sits above a High Court judge in deciding which cases have merit? I hope the Minister can answer that question, because I am confused. She is learned; I am not learned—nobody gets to be learned just from being street smart, unfortunately. If only there was a degree in that.

[Stephen Pound]

My hon. Friend would be a professor emeritus.

[Jess Phillips]

I would be an emeritus professor in street smarts.

I feel that the Legal Aid Agency or the Government will eventually renege on this point. I associate myself with all the requests made by my hon. Friend the Member for Birmingham, Northfield, but we have had to go around the hamster wheel again to ask whether, if the Legal Aid Agency is not the route for families, justice can be served through extra funding that the Government allocate from elsewhere.

[Mr Jim Cunningham (Coventry South) (Lab)]

My hon. Friend is making a very good point. Most people can remember where they were on the day when this tragedy happened. It is interesting that the Government can find the money when they want to do something, but when ordinary families want to take legal action and get justice, the Government cannot find the money. I always thought it was the Government’s duty to protect people, and one way to do that is through securing justice for them. Does my hon. Friend agree?

[Jess Phillips]

Quite. I cannot remember where I was on that day, because I was not yet born, yet it has stayed in the history of the city that I come from and have lived in all my life. If Birmingham were cut, it would bleed still with this unsolved disaster. After years of quite rightly hearing about the miscarriages of justice for those who were convicted of the crimes, the victims in the story have been lost, and it is now time for their story to be told.

I absolutely agree with my hon. Friend—the Government will perfectly easily fund the side that fights against this. I have no doubt that the coroner will have all the resources that are needed. Why can they always find it for one side and not the other? This is not a case of people making vexatious claims that will open the door to everybody being able to make a load of claims against the state really easily. If these families have proved anything, it is that this is no picnic. It is not easy. There is nothing easy about this process, and that suggestion should be disregarded as a reason why what seems to be an austerity measure is affecting them so much.

I finish my remarks by paying a massive tribute to the families in this case. I am often proud to be from Birmingham—in fact, almost daily. These families make me incredibly proud of my city’s resolve in keeping on going.