Ministry of Justice: Legal Aid Spending

Karen Buck Excerpts

Thursday 22nd October 2020 Westminster Hall

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

It is a pleasure to have you in the Chair for this debate, Mr Robertson. I congratulate the Chair of the Justice Committee, the hon. Member for Bromley and Chislehurst (Sir Robert Neill), on securing the debate and on the content and nature of his speech, which I think will strike a number of chords across the Chamber. He made, as always, a powerful case for the principles on which legal aid rests. It underpins the rule of law in this country. If people are unable to access representation in civil and criminal cases, the rule of law is effectively denied to them. That is a powerful and important point. He also laid out some of the ways in which the pressures on the legal aid system are affecting individuals and communities, which I am sure will be reinforced, and which I certainly intend to reinforce myself.

[Siobhain McDonagh in the Chair]

Two years ago almost to the week, I was fortunate enough to open a debate in this Chamber on legal aid and to set out a number of the facts of what has happened to the legal aid service in the years since the LASPO Act was introduced. The grim truth is that, in almost every respect, the situation has got worse in those two years, and I will refer to a few of the figures in a moment. However, I particularly want to adopt as the context for my comments—as was briefly introduced by the hon. Gentleman—the impact of coronavirus. Grave as the situation was before, we are about to enter a period in which all the inequalities in access to justice and in the experiences on which that rests will become significantly worse.

We all have different experiences in different parts of the country, but I can say that my case load as a Member of Parliament has doubled in the past six months or so. Of those cases, a worrying—indeed, terrifying —number are outside my capacity to do anything about. They include people seeking urgent advice, help and representation on aspects of their lives that have been fundamentally disrupted by covid, particularly in the area of employment. Although there are sources of advice out there, and although—I will reinforce this again in my comments—I am lucky, in terms of the access to services that I have in my part of inner London, it has been absolutely terrifying how little assistance there is to refer people to.

I spoke to my local citizens advice bureau, which is superb, about that demand and about the early advice that it has been able to give. It told me that it received 6,000 separate inquiries between April and June, with 1,400 about social security—people losing incomes and jobs—1,000 housing-related inquiries and 500 employment- related inquiries, covering self-employment, redundancy or dismissal, the furlough scheme and access to employment tribunals.

It is absolutely clear from my case load, the citizens advice bureau’s and many other organisations’ that under the surface of the volume of need for advice, advocacy and representation, some of it is a need for early help and some is a need for being guided to the right kind of advice for people to make the right decisions in their own circumstances. However, it conceals a significant number of cases involving rogue employers or rogue landlords—sometimes rogue employees and claimants too, it must be said—where people are at severe risk. They are being exploited and need legal representation, which they are unable to get. I do not consider myself able to give any form of employment advice, so I have to signpost people to sources of help that are often simply not available to them.

I have had to deal with the number of illegal evictions during these past months. There was an evictions ban, now lifted by the Government, during the worst of the coronavirus months, but we know that people have been exploiting the vulnerability of a number of tenants and there have been illegal evictions. We need to be able to provide representation for those individuals. While we all agree that early help is a good thing and is frequently lacking, access to a legal aid solicitor is crucial in those circumstances, and far too often it is simply not forthcoming.

As I say, I am aware that we are well-resourced in London—nothing like compared with the level of need, but certainly compared with some other parts of the country. We know from the figures what has happened to the number of legal aid suppliers in different parts of the country. For example, when the LAA carried out its civil tender exercise in April 2013, it found that there were 3,500 civil provider legal aid offices, but as of October 2020 that had dropped to 1,774, or half the number of civil providers. In crime the picture is not so different: in 2013, there were 2,338 offices practising criminal legal aid. As of this month, that figure has now dropped to 1,058.

The number of providers has plunged and some parts of the country are simply deserts—we know the phrase—in terms of legal aid and access to services. As for access to civil aid in community care, the Law Society figures show that 37 million people in England and Wales are in a local authority area without a single community care legal aid provider and 37% of the population now live in a local authority with no housing legal aid providers at all. As need has intensified and as the coronavirus has exposed the level of need and vulnerability even more starkly, the providers are simply not there, and that is reflected in the expenditure figures and in the numbers of matter starts in all those areas of service.

We know how grave the situation is. We rely on legal aid lawyers now to carry out their work effectively, in some parts of the service almost for nothing. The level of remuneration is so poor that we rely heavily on the goodwill, dedication and vocation of legal aid lawyers to do this work. The Chair of the Select Committee, the hon. Member for Bromley and Chislehurst, referred to the kind of demands we place on people in the criminal service to provide services in the middle of the night in police stations, but in civil law we are also asking people to carry out work on very complex cases for an extraordinarily low level of remuneration.

At the same time, we are asking this overstretched and under-resourced service to cope with more and more demands on it. We have a constant, but increasingly faster, drumbeat of abuse of the legal profession: they are all too frequently labelled “fat cat legal aid lawyers” who are regarded as if they are growing rich at the public’s expense. Also, sadly all too frequently, there is this smearing by associating lawyers with political motivation and the label of “activist lawyers”, which is a highly dangerous way of labelling a profession. I am sorry to introduce a non-partisan element to the debate, but it is disgraceful that Ministers—I exempt the Minister who is here today—are not standing up for the legal profession in the way that they should. In not defending those professionals, they are undermining the rule of law, which we all agree that legal aid is such a central part of.

The need is greater than ever it was. If it was a dire situation in 2018 when we last had a full debate on legal aid, we are now on the edge of the abyss in terms of legal aid provision. As we say again and again, the expenditure is not great, proportionately in public expenditure terms, but the expense of failing to invest in legal aid properly is great. I am not saying for a second that rising homelessness is a consequence of the lack of legal aid services, but I do say that when people are unable to get proper advice and representation in dealing with debt or housing benefit claims, that is part of the reason that people lose their homes. We have seen street homelessness double and family homelessness increase by 50% in the last 10 years. Those figures are not wholly accidental and that is an expense that falls on other parts of the public purse. It is truly a false economy.

I am delighted that the Justice Committee is conducting its inquiry. The all-party parliamentary group is also conducting an inquiry; we will have the first meeting next week, looking at criminal legal aid. We are looking at legal aid in the context of the recovery from coronavirus, and it is absolutely right that we should do that. We need to embed our public policy in the context of a set of pressures that we have never seen before in this country; it cannot be isolated from that. I look forward to what the Minister has to say, but I echo what the Chair of the Justice Committee said: we need assistance for the sector and we need it urgently.