Legal Aid, Sentencing and Punishment of Offenders Bill

Debate between Julie Elliott and Rehman Chishti

Wednesday 29th June 2011 Commons Chamber

[Rehman Chishti]

rose—

[Julie Elliott]

I may not be an economist, but I am a British taxpayer and I can tell the House that the figures simply do not add up.

Even the Justice Committee, in its third report on legal aid, said:

“We are surprised that the Government is proposing to make such changes without assessing their likely impact on spending from the public purse”.

This is another case of the Government not listening to the experts on legal aid. I think we are detecting a theme here.

Let us maybe have one more for luck. I commend the good work of organisations such as the Law Society on looking at alternative cost-saving measures. The Law Society proposed alternative savings worth £384 million—£34 million more than the Government are looking to cut—which would still protect all civil and family legal representation. The Law Society made its representations but was ignored. Then the Justice Committee recommended that the Government assess the merits of their proposals. Again, that recommendation was not listened to.

With these reforms the Conservatives are demonstrating their reckless handling of the British justice system. We already knew that we could not trust the Conservatives to protect the most vulnerable members of our society; we now know that we cannot trust them to uphold the founding principles of British justice either. The Government’s own impact assessment says that these reforms will increase costs, increase criminality and reduce social cohesion. With that testament, I am left wondering: what are the real costs of these reforms to legal aid?