Legal Aid, Sentencing and Punishment of Offenders Bill

Karen Buck Excerpts

Wednesday 29th June 2011 Commons Chamber

[Sadiq Khan]

I have done that before and I shall do so again in a while—[Interruption.] I am happy to answer that question.

The Justice Secretary’s remand policies demonstrate how budget cutting is taking priority over the best interests of our justice system. Defendants will not be remanded in custody when there is “no real prospect” of a custodial sentence being handed down. The Government’s victims commissioner, Louise Casey, says:

“Victims’ groups during consultation have expressed alarm”

at those proposals. The Magistrates Association and the Sentencing Council have also expressed opposition. The Sentencing Council states that

“in some cases it will not be clear until the conclusion of the trial/the preparation of the pre-sentence report whether the offence in fact merits a custodial sentence.”

The council reminds us that

“The primary reason for remanding a defendant in custody is that he or she will fail to attend court”;

or that there is a “risk of further offending”; and/or that

“there may be a good reason to believe that the defendant will interfere with witnesses”.

Does the Justice Secretary not realise that that change is likely to deter witnesses and victims from coming forward?

Lords Justices Thomas and Goldring both raised the genuine concern that

“the decision whether or not to grant bail is quite separate from the decision as to the eventual sentence”,

yet they have been ignored. In this Chamber last week, when ditching his 50% sentence reduction proposal, the Justice Secretary said that he had

“paid particular regard to the legal opinions that”

he

“was getting from serious members of the judiciary and others”.—[Official Report, 21 June 2011; Vol. 530, c. 169.]

It is disappointing that he has ignored not only Lady Justice Hale, but the concerns of the senior judiciary and others on the remand policy, and that he has not removed it from the Bill.

Indeterminate sentences for public protection are notable by their absence from the Bill—that is another example of the shambles that the Justice Secretary is in. He has talked of the need to reform the system of IPPs, the use of which had mushroomed well beyond the original purpose. IPPs have a role as they were originally envisaged, and I acknowledge the efforts of my right hon. Friend the Member for Blackburn (Mr Straw) to reform them.

This Government proposed a new approach to IPPs in their Green Paper, which were subsequently consulted on, as has been said. They favoured raising the minimum tariff to a 10-year determinate sentence before an IPP can be enforced—a length of sentence beyond that handed down for violent and sexual offences including rape and assault. We were opposed to that. However, there is nothing whatever in the Bill about that. The Justice Secretary today confirmed that he will be getting rid of IPPs, but he has also announced an urgent review of them. Has he not pre-empted the outcome of his review? My right hon. Friend the Member for Wythenshawe and Sale East (Paul Goggins) raised the interesting point about learning lessons from Northern Ireland, but the Justice Secretary will not do so, because he has already made his mind up, putting cost over the protection of the public.

Labour’s position on IPPs is clear: offenders must be punished and reformed. They must not pose a risk to the public and proper due process must be followed before their release, supported by courses and programmes and an effectively resourced Parole Board, to allow rehabilitation to take place. We will not accept plans that water down the protection given to the public by IPPs. We believe that there is a continuing role for IPPs. They should be reserved for very serious and violent offenders—those who are the biggest risk to the public—as was their original purpose.

The Justice Secretary’s solution appears to be mandatory life sentences for all those deemed to be a serious danger to the public if released. He has no idea if that will lead to the prison population going up or down, and no idea what he will do about those who have served their minimum tariff who are on an IPP. Why is he so unwilling to invest in programmes, courses and the Parole Board to address offender behaviour?

The absence of IPPs from the Bill has created further questions about the Secretary of State’s budget. As a result, the impact assessment is incomplete. Moreover, the Prime Minister last week appeared to announce more mandatory life sentences and longer determinate sentences, and that serious offenders would serve at least two thirds of their sentence. However, those proposals—those new policies—are absent from the Bill. Given that one of the causes of the backlog in IPPs is a shortage of suitable courses and resources for the Parole Board, how does he expect the two-third sentence proposals to avoid running into exactly the same resource issues as IPPs? Utter shambles!

Legal aid is another important issue. Our legal aid system was established as a fundamental pillar of the post-war welfare state. Clement Attlee’s Government rightly recognised that equality in the face of the law should not be undermined by a lack of finance. Therefore, it is bitterly disappointing that the Bill has made only minimal changes to the cuts proposed in the Green Paper. On the day when the Green Paper was published, I accepted that the Opposition, too, would have made cuts to the legal aid budget. However, I asked the Justice Secretary to look again at the areas he was targeting. He has not done so.

As a result, the weight of opposition to the proposals remains huge. He is damned by the numerous campaigning groups representing some of the most vulnerable people in society, the 31 charities that wrote last week to The Times in protest, the Law Society, the Bar Council and other members of the judiciary, and yet he has ignored their concerns—[Interruption.] I will let hon. Members know right now the Opposition’s view of legal aid. We oppose the cuts to social welfare legal aid—the kind of early-stage advice provided by law centres and citizens advice bureaux on debt, housing, welfare benefits and education issues—because of the disproportionate way that they will affect the most needy in our society. The result, as campaigning group Justice has said, will be the “economic cleansing” of our civil courts. Some estimates suggest that more than 700,000 people will have their access to justice taken away.

That is compounded by the disproportionate impact that the proposals will have on women, in particular because of the definition of domestic violence. Once again, this Government are hitting women the hardest.

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

Does my right hon. Friend agree that one problem the Government have so far failed to address is ensuring the sustainability of the law firms, centres and practices across the country? It is not just a question of individuals losing their service; those centres and that provision will be undermined, and in many cases, face collapse.

[Sadiq Khan]

My hon. Friend is right to remind the House that if we are not careful, the country will become an advice desert for the poor and the vulnerable as a result of that policy.

The previous Labour Government always strove to protect social welfare legal aid. Our March 2010 proposals, which have been strangely ignored by this Government, would have generated savings sufficient to protect social welfare legal aid. The Justice Secretary’s changes will have a huge impact on the viability of many law centres, CABs and high street practices up and down the country that do an enormous amount to provide access to justice for some of our most deprived citizens. Do hon. Members know what the irony of that is? It is that this is the time when they need that advice most. A whole swathe of society is losing the ability to exercise its legal rights, with women particularly affected. The Lord Chief Justice has warned that the proposals will damage access to justice, and Citizens Advice has warned that the cuts will leave hundreds of thousands with nowhere to turn for help and has demonstrated the savings to the taxpayer down the line from early intervention: £1 of legal expenditure on housing advice will save the state £2.34, and on benefits advice the saving is £8.80. So there is a moral as well as an economic case for not cutting in this way. As the Justice Secretary knows, the Lord Chief Justice warned that legal aid cuts risked a surge in litigants in person, with all the associated increase in stress and costs.