Future of Legal Aid

Karen Buck Excerpts

Thursday 1st November 2018 Westminster Hall

[Ms Karen Buck (Westminster North) (Lab)]

It is a great pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Sir Henry, particularly given your personal interest in and commitment to this field of policy. It is also a great pleasure to follow two superb speeches that set out the broad range of topics that we need to cover. I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Hammersmith (Andy Slaughter) on securing the debate and on his opening speech. I strongly commend the speech of the Chair of the Justice Committee, the hon. Member for Bromley and Chislehurst (Robert Neill); I do not think I disagreed with a word of it.

The excellent briefings that we received in advance of the debate from a wide range of organisations come on top of a wealth of analysis that has already contributed to the debate, not only from the Justice Committee but from my own Committee, the Joint Committee on Human Rights, which produced a report including an analysis of many of the post-LASPO failings. The case has already been made, as we have heard today, but I wish to make a few remarks to convey not just an analytical concern for the post-LASPO world, but the real anxiety, passion and anger that so many people feel about the environment in which we find ourselves.

Yesterday morning, we marked Justice Week with a meeting of the all-party parliamentary group on legal aid. We were very pleased that the Minister came to speak to us and that the meeting was very well attended, including by the Bar Council, the Law Society, parliamentarians, a great many people from the not-for-profit sector, and solicitors. We heard a compelling case for the central role of legal aid and for ensuring access to justice. We heard the message that the Government need to hear thunder reverberating, because every single prediction made before the passage of LASPO has come to pass. We heard that the situation has declined to the point that the criminal Bar has thought it necessary to take strike action and the Law Society is taking legal action against the Government. It is unprecedented in modern times for those organisations to feel compelled to take such strong action, but they want the Government to hear exactly what is going on.

Sadly, in Justice Week, we also learned in the Budget that the Ministry of Justice, which with the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government has already taken the largest cuts of any Department, is to be subject to yet another cut. It is an unprotected Department, and we now know that its budget will be cut from £6.3 billion to £6 billion. We are making the case for legal aid in a context in which justice funding is falling still further.

As we have heard, legal aid is in competition with many other areas of justice that are also under intolerable pressure. Almost every hon. Member in this Chamber has been present at debates that conveyed our anxiety about other creaking, breaking parts of the criminal justice system, so it is understandable that we are extremely concerned to ensure that the case for legal aid is not made at the expense of the prison service or the other parts of the justice system that are also under absolutely intolerable strain. In truth, the thunder is reverberating; it is just that the Government have not been listening.

I will not repeat in great detail the case that has been made so widely in this House and through the many forms of evidence submitted to the LASPO review about the consequences of areas of service falling out of scope and of the tightening of eligibility. The impact on providers has in turn had an impact on people—often the most vulnerable people—who need to be effectively represented.

[Robert Neill]

I agree entirely with the hon. Lady’s argument, and I am glad that she referred to Justice Week. Does she agree that it might be worth while for every Member of this House to watch the Bar Council’s video about justice cuts, in which several providers, as well as hon. Members, talk about the impact on the individual cases they deal with?

[Ms Buck]

Absolutely. I would love every Member of this House to watch that video and to be made aware of the case being made.

We know what is happening to legal aid providers. Law centres lost 60% of their income from legal aid post LASPO, and in the immediate aftermath we lost eleven law centres. I pay tribute to my own centre, Paddington law centre, which provides such an essential service. I also commend North Kensington law centre—this country’s first law centre, which I used to represent but is now just outside my constituency—for doing such extraordinary work in the aftermath of Grenfell.

Law centres are indispensable; they are an integral part of effective community life. The Chair of the Justice Committee was absolutely right to draw attention to the fact that justice is not a private transaction. These services—particularly law centres, but not only them—are part of a healthy community and a strong civic life. The consequences of undermining them go far beyond the individuals concerned.

[Alex Chalk]

Does the hon. Lady agree that there is a lesson for us in this place, too? There is no point in our standing up, making speeches, passing legislation and pontificating grandly if the laws that we give effect to are ultimately not capable of being enforced. Is that not a crucial point?

--- Later in debate ---

[Ms Buck]

That is absolutely right. I will come on to a variant of that theme—the extent to which the law is having to bear the burden of bad laws and bad implementation of policy. We are seeing even more of that now than we were before.

In addition to the impact on law centres, we have also seen a fall in the number of providers across the piece, including a 60% fall in not-for-profit providers. I am sure that the Government did not want not-for-profits, with all their ability to lever in additional support from outside legal aid, to be a form of service that was reduced, yet absolutely inevitably and as was predicted, the not-for-profit sector has seen some of the deepest cuts.

As we heard, there has been a calamitous fall across the piece in new acts of assistance, with legal help matter starts down from 573,000 in 2012 to 140,000 in 2017, so we know that people who would previously have got legal assistance and representation are now not doing so. We have heard also about the kinds of areas of service where that has had an impact. What we have not heard yet is that this is happening in a context in which the demand and need for that kind of representation and advocacy is growing.

In terms of welfare, that is an absolute explicit consequence of the welfare reform legislation, the Welfare Reform Act 2012 and the changes to disability benefits, which have seen so many people losing their benefits. They have been making appeals against that, and winning those appeals in unprecedented numbers—at a level that clearly demonstrates the total inadequacy of the way in which disability policy has been drawn up—but those appeals are only being won where people have representation and advocacy. There is a difference in the success rate for people who are appealing against loss of benefits where they are represented and where they are not. It is deeply worrying that people with identical conditions and identical sets of circumstances may or may not be successful in maintaining or restoring their disability benefits depending on whether they live in an area where they are able to access advice and representation.

As people will not be surprised to know, another issue that is close to my heart, homelessness, is another factor. After many years in which homelessness fell, there has been a doubling of rough sleeping and a 50% increase in the number of families going into the homelessness system. Although that remains within scope, with the loss of providers and the pressure on the system, the demand for assistance is rising but the ability to provide is not.

Speakers this afternoon have talked about different groups of people who have fed evidence in to the debate. I am particularly grateful to Youth Access for its briefing. It wanted to draw attention to the predicament of young people, who experience many of the difficulties with the welfare system and housing on the same level as others, but who are particularly unlikely to be able to access help. Youth Access states that 84% of young people are left unaided in their search for legal representation. That too will have worsened post-LASPO.

It is unfashionable in this House to champion the cause of the lawyers who provide these services. We often hear about fat cat lawyers, or see the media representation of the tiny number of lawyers who have made a considerable amount of money through the legal aid system. The truth is that legal aid lawyers are in very challenging financial circumstances. They have not had a pay rise for a very long time. Unless we are able to retain them and attract a new generation of lawyers into legal aid, the service available in some parts of the country will decline further. I saw another example today of areas of the country where nobody is bidding or competing for legal aid contracts in housing law, because they are simply not able to make money out of them.

In the debate in my name on the LASPO review a few weeks ago, I set out a more detailed critique of what has gone wrong since 2012, so I will not cover any more of those points now. The Minister was very courteous in her response and subsequently replied to some of the questions; she also attended a meeting of the all-party parliamentary group. I understand that she is not able to pre-empt the conclusions of the LASPO review today, but in that debate at the beginning of September I listened in vain for a sense of a real commitment to understanding the scale of the challenge that we face. I hope that today she will be able not just to tell us what money is going into the legal aid system—I think we already know that—but to convey a sense of her passion for wanting to address and redress the problems that so many people across the board are now telling her about.

What we are looking for, and what we hope we hear a commitment to today with the detail spelled out when we get the LASPO review, is a restoration of money for early help. Everybody understands the importance of early intervention and preventive services, so we want to get a commitment to putting money back into early help. We have specific and detailed proposals for improving eligibility, for simplifying and clarifying the rules on eligibility and for bringing certain areas back into scope. Family law is a particular area that we want to see restored, as well as criminal legal aid, which should include a proper recognition of the need to tackle the under-remuneration of criminal legal aid lawyers.

Access to justice is as fundamental to the functioning of a good society as services such as health and education, which we more often invoke when we talk about public services. Access to justice is now being deeply and dangerously undermined. We need not just warm words, but urgent and immediate action from the Minister.

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[Lucy Frazer]

My hon. Friend is very knowledgeable and experienced in many matters, including this one. He does a great amount of work on behalf of the legal aid professions and people who use the services we provide through Justice. As always, he makes an important point. I have listened carefully to all the points that have been made in this debate and throughout my time as Minister.

I will answer some of the many points made in the debate—you are right that I will not have time to respond to all of them, Mr Bailey. The hon. Member for Hammersmith spoke about the provisions in the Budget, but failed to mention the provision to build a new prison at Glen Parva, £30 million for prisons, and £20.5 million for the wider justice system.

A number of Members mentioned that legal aid is not provided in a number of areas. It is important to be clear about where legal aid is available and where it is not; we are reviewing where it is not available and has been taken out of scope. One reason why people do not access legal aid may be that they do not think it is available at all. Where we provide it, we need to say loud and clear that it is available. Some Members mentioned the lack of availability for housing and medical negligence, but the hon. Member for Westminster North (Ms Buck) rightly acknowledged that legal aid is available when a person’s house is at risk of repossession.

[Ms Buck]

I acknowledge that point, but that was in the context of my arguing that these things are only as useful as the number of providers. A central argument advanced by the Opposition is about the loss of providers—the fact that people are not bidding for contracts. Does the Minister recognise and acknowledge that point?