Legal Aid

John McDonnell Excerpts

Wednesday 11th May 2011 Westminster Hall

[Jeremy Corbyn (Islington North) (Lab)]

I congratulate the hon. Member for Cambridge (Dr Huppert) on obtaining the debate and on how he introduced it. It is a valuable subject. I apologise in advance to the Minister as I might miss part of his reply because I have a delegation from Disability Action in Islington to meet just before 4 o’clock. I hope that he understands that I need to be there to see them.

This is not the first or, I suspect, the last debate that we will have on legal aid. I hope that the Minister will give us an idea of when the Government will respond to the consultation. I hope that there will be adequate time for us to digest their response and a full day’s debate on the Floor of the House long before any legislation or changes are put in place.

It must be almost unprecedented to have 5,000 replies to a consultation of this nature—I am sure that the Minister has read all of them. I hope that he read the one from Jeremy Corbyn, MP for Islington North, because it was greatly laboured over. It did not involve only my views; I called a consultation meeting of local legal aid practitioners, advice agencies, the local authority and others, so what I put forward is on their behalf as much as my own. They have extremely strong views about the situation, as one can imagine.

The knock-on effects of legal aid and Ministry of Justice budget support to advice agencies are very important indeed. I do not believe—any more than anybody else does—that people should litigate for the sake of litigation. However, effective citizens advice bureaux play a very important part in giving people access to justice ahead of the danger of going to law. Cuts in CAB budgets or advice budgets are simply not very sensible at any time—particularly now, when many people are facing economic difficulties.

I pay enormous tribute to Islington council, which has just managed to reopen the CAB in the borough. It reopened on 1 April and it is already heavily overloaded, as we had predicted, but it is doing its best in the circumstances. Commendably, there is a liaison arrangement between the CAB, Islington Law Centre, Islington People’s Rights and the local authority, to ensure that they share out responsibility and specialist knowledge to offer any particular help that is required. That is very good as it ends the idea of competition between advice agencies, particularly where funding is concerned.

There are many issues to be covered in this debate, but I want to be brief as the Front-Bench spokesmen obviously need to respond. Housing issues are massive and they are faced by people in inner city communities, such as the one that I have the honour to represent, probably more than by anyone else. I will just quote from an e-mail that I received from Anne Baxendale of Shelter about this issue:

“The government is proposing to remove all housing benefits cases and a third of other housing cases from the scope of legal aid. Shelter is alarmed that this is happening at the same time that huge changes are taking place within homelessness legislation, social housing tenure and the housing benefit system.”

People are already coming to my surgery or advice bureau about this issue and the same is true for Islington People’s Rights, Islington Law Centre and the CAB. Those people are being told that their housing benefit, or housing allowance, is insufficient to meet the new rent levels; even with the transitional payments, they are nowhere near meeting them. In some cases, they are £100 a week—or even more—light on the demands being made of them. The only alternative for them is to move to somewhere else that is cheaper—if they can afford to do so, given all the associated uprooting. These people are scared, even terrified, and they desperately need access to good-quality legal representation to protect themselves at a time of emergency. Taking legal aid away from such people is simply grossly unfair—it would be unfair at any time, but it is particularly unfair at this time.

I will be very brief on the issues relating to children, as there is not much time left. The question of children and immigration issues is a very great one indeed. I understand, appreciate and welcome the fact—indeed, I applaud it—that asylum cases have been removed from this picture. Contrary to what the hon. Member for South Swindon (Mr Buckland) said, I do not believe that there is an endless merry-go-round of appeals. What I have found is that there is an incredible degree of inefficiency at the Home Office and the Border and Immigration Agency, such that asylum cases often hang around for years.

I am embarrassed to tell people that they must wait a year for a reply to a letter and that if they phone up the Home Office they will only make things worse. That is not how a Government Department or any public service should ever deal with or respond to anybody. I say to the Minister that he should keep legal aid for asylum cases, but he might ask his colleagues at the Home Office kindly to reply to letters and not lose files. I have said that to every Government I have had dealings with, so it is not a party political point; I said it to my own Government and I will say it to any Government.

The decision to give legal aid only for cases of detention is simply unfair. If legal aid is given, an application is made and the person is then released from detention. However, they then lose legal aid; they might end up back in detention where they might get legal aid again, so that they are on a merry-go-round. It is simply not credible that such an arbitrary distinction can be made between support for detention and support for immigration cases. Immigration cases should either be supported or not; I do not see how a simple distinction can be drawn in that way.

[John McDonnell (Hayes and Harlington) (Lab)]

My hon. Friend and I are part of a 10-year campaign to try to get the proper inspection and registration of immigration advisers. These measures could take us back to those back-street advisers again, whereby the most vulnerable people are exploited in dreadful ways and wind up in detention as a result.

[Jeremy Corbyn]

I was just talking to my hon. Friend the Member for Makerfield (Yvonne Fovargue) about the exploitative individuals—and, frankly, the chancers—who have now become involved in immigration law. Basically they are spivs, who charge very vulnerable people very large sums of money for writing letters. They do no more than that. Some of them are not even qualified.

My hon. Friend the Member for Hayes and Harlington (John McDonnell) is absolutely right. For many years, we campaigned in this House for proper registration of immigration practitioners and for an end to immigration advisers, who in any case are often unqualified. The late Bernie Grant, the former MP for Tottenham, was extremely active on that issue and we basically got rid of most of those immigration advisers. However, they are all back now, big-time, and they are making a great deal of money out of extremely vulnerable people. I am sure that the Minister is aware of that problem. It has been reflected in many of the submissions made to him and I look forward to a response from him that recognises that.

The final point that I want to make about children is about the removal of legal aid for education cases. I have a distressing number of immigration cases in my constituency involving education. I do not have a vast number of them, but they are often very distressing and the people involved need representation. That is because some children who are suspended or expelled from school then have to go to another school. Unfortunately their representation and their files often follow them around and they end up being almost totally excluded from the whole education system. That is not good for them and it is not good for anybody. Proper representation would often prevent that situation from happening.

The number of cases that are dealt with by legal aid in this country at the moment is 934,000, apparently. Unless the Minister is going to give us some very good news at the end of the month, or whenever the reply to the consultation comes, the cuts being proposed will mean that more than 600,000 people will not have access to legal aid. If we want a fair, decent and just society, everyone must have access to the law. We are seeking not a litigation society, but a justice society and I hope that the Minister will understand the strength of feeling expressed in the representations that he receives on this matter.

The vast majority of solicitors and barristers acting on legal aid cases do not make much money out of that work. They make far more money on commercial cases, libel cases, media cases or “personality”-driven cases. The majority of solicitors I meet who deal with legal aid cases that are hard to sort out are paid very little. They work very hard and they are doing us a lot of good.

Furthermore, the loss of training contracts means that many of the solicitors of tomorrow will not be around to represent people. Many young people are studying law in universities and colleges at present. We want them to use their skills and we want them to represent the hardest-hit and most vulnerable people in society. I ask the Minister to think carefully about the very thoughtful and very carefully prepared representations that I know he has received on this subject.