IOPC Report on Metropolitan Police Officers' Conduct: Charing Cross Police Station

Karen Buck Excerpts

Wednesday 2nd February 2022 Commons Chamber

[Kit Malthouse]

As somebody who, as I said, served in City Hall as deputy mayor for policing, I can tell the House that the intention of the Greater London Authority Act 1999, which created the mayoralty and put the police authority and then the Metropolitan police under the control of the Mayor of London, was to ensure that the forensic examination of Met performance and internal processes could be done as close to the frontline as possible and that the Mayor should be in the driving seat.

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

As one of the two Members of Parliament for Westminster, I have always greatly valued and supported the work of our local police, and I think that our good and decent police officers will also be appalled by what they have seen in the past few days. They know what we know—that policing a young, modern, diverse city such as Westminster and London is founded on trust. That trust will also be reflected by having a police service that reflects London, so will the Minister tell us what immediate steps he is taking to review the progress, which has faltered over recent years, in ensuring that London’s police service is as diverse in all its forms as the city that it polices?

[Kit Malthouse]

Hon. Members will have seen that, as part of our uplift programme not just in London, but elsewhere, we are specifically pushing to increase diversity both in terms of gender and race within policing. That is important nowhere more than in London and we have been working closely with the Metropolitan police to maximise the possibility of not only people from a BME background, but women joining the police force.

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.

Oral Answers to Questions

Karen Buck Excerpts

Tuesday 9th June 2020 Commons Chamber

[Jessica Morden (Newport East) (Lab)]

What steps his Department has taken to ensure access to justice during the covid-19 outbreak.

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

What steps his Department has taken to ensure access to justice during the covid-19 outbreak.

[The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Justice (Alex Chalk)]

The covid-19 outbreak has raised real challenges for the justice system, and we have taken rapid action where we can with the help of practitioners and the judiciary, who have been fantastic, to overcome those challenges and maintain access for all. Some 159 courts remained open across all jurisdictions, and a further 116 were staffed. On 18 May, we were able to restart jury trials, and we will be scaling them up in the weeks ahead.

[Alex Chalk]

I thank the hon. Lady for the very proper concern that she expresses. I or one of my fellow Ministers would be happy to have a meeting. Every effort is being made to increase capacity to the fullest extent possible, but on the specific issue she raised about keeping victims and witnesses engaged, we are very much alive to that. I spend a great deal of time speaking to victims’ services, which do a wonderful job, together with the police, of making sure that victims remain informed, engaged and involved.

[Ms Buck]

The Law Society has highlighted how many legal aid providers are in danger of imminent collapse, because of the financial pressures of covid. They have had warm words from the Government, but no more. Will the Minister tell us what discussions he has had with the Treasury and when he last met it to discuss the plight of legal aid providers?

[Alex Chalk]

Legal aid is absolutely vital in a fair society. It is one of the vital bulwarks of our liberty, and we take extremely seriously the needs of legal aid providers. Steps have been taken to ensure that where there is money in the system—more than £400 million—that is more easily available for practitioners to draw down, so that they can be helped to weather the storm. That is of course over and above other schemes that apply to legal aid practitioners as to everyone else, whether that is the furlough scheme or the bounce-back loans scheme. Those measures are in place to keep these vital providers in business so that they can continue to do their important work.

Oral Answers to Questions

Karen Buck Excerpts

Tuesday 8th October 2019 Commons Chamber

[The Minister of State, Ministry of Justice (Lucy Frazer)]

My hon. Friend has done some work in this area as a former trustee of a charity that seeks to rehabilitate ex-offenders. He raises a very important point. The new futures network, which we recently set up, and to which 500 employers have now signed up, seeks to ensure that ex-offenders are rehabilitated into jobs in the community.

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

T3. The number of civil legal aid providers has fallen by a third since 2013. In February, the Government announced, under the legal support plan, a review of criminal legal aid providers. Will the Government today announce a similar review of civil legal aid provision to look at the levels of remuneration and how we can ensure capacity in all areas of the country?

[Wendy Morton]

As the hon. Lady will know, criminal defence lawyers play a crucial role in upholding the rule of law, and the Government greatly value their work. We have the legal aid support action plan, which we are working through, and I am keen to do all I can as legal aid Minister in this regard.

Domestic Abuse Bill

Karen Buck Excerpts

Wednesday 2nd October 2019 Commons Chamber

[Carolyn Harris]

I could not agree more. This is something that we all see every day when we talk to people who have experienced or witnessed domestic violence. In many cases, it is learned behaviour and we really need to look at that.

As it stands, although there are some welcome and vital changes in the Bill, it is too narrow. There are many areas that are crying out for wider scope. I hope that this can and will be addressed and incorporated through amendments in Committee.

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

Will my hon. Friend give way?

[Carolyn Harris]

I just want to make a little progress.

We have volumes of data relating to victims of domestic abuse, but at present this only accounts for those aged 74 and under, even though we know that domestic abuse has no age limit. Older people must have their rights protected too, and the Bill needs to recognise that. Statistics consistently demonstrate that the vast majority of domestic abuse victims are women and the vast majority of perpetrators are men, but we know that there are no barriers. Anyone—regardless of sex, sexual orientation, age or race—can be a victim or a perpetrator, so we must ensure that service and funding provision is appropriately proportioned.

Legal Aid: Post-Implementation Review

Karen Buck Excerpts

Thursday 7th February 2019 Commons Chamber

[Mr Gauke]

Let me highlight a couple of points in the review. I have already mentioned the proposals on unaccompanied minors in immigration cases. It is also worth pointing out that with special guardianship orders, we are extending the scope of legal aid. Those are all steps that go some way towards addressing the hon. Gentleman’s concerns.

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

Will the Lord Chancellor confirm what everybody involved in legal aid knows, which is that the post-LASPO cuts have led to expenditure in other service areas, specifically the courts service? Does the report quantify that expenditure? Will he confirm that the report confirms that the Department does not know whether the reductions in legal aid have resulted in the service being targeted on those in greatest need? Finally, will he confirm that, welcome though it is, the extra money provided today represents less than 2% of the total reduction in the budget since 2013?

[Mr Gauke]

First, I pay tribute to the hon. Lady, who is among those who have worked tirelessly in this policy area and who, as ever, brings great expertise to this matter. In respect of evaluating the overall impacts, we do need more evidence, which is why we want to have pilots to bring in more evidence and test the system to see whether we can reduce costs on the system as a whole through, for example, greater and earlier intervention. I want to build up an evidence-based business case to see how we should move forward. In respect of evaluating the impact on particular groups, one has to consider the system on an area by area basis. It is important that we continue to engage and look at the evidence that emerges.

Oral Answers to Questions

Karen Buck Excerpts

Tuesday 18th December 2018 Commons Chamber

[Rory Stewart]

As I have said on a number of occasions, this is not fundamentally about private and public: there are good private prisons and good public prisons, and there are bad private prisons and bad public prisons. But I will give this assurance: unless G4S can demonstrate that it can take back that prison and run it both well and sustainably, we will not be returning the prison to G4S.

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

12. What assessment he has made of the prevalence of legal advice deserts.

[The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Justice (Lucy Frazer)]

I am grateful to the hon. Lady, who chairs the all-party group on legal aid and has done a lot of work in this area. We recognise that in some sparsely populated areas it is more difficult to find service providers, but the Legal Aid Agency regularly reviews market capacity to make sure there is adequate provision across the country and moves quickly to fill any gaps that it identifies. At the latest civil legal aid tender, the number of offices providing access to advice increased by 39% for immigration and asylum, by 188% for welfare benefits and by 7% for debt and housing.

[Ms Buck]

With homelessness up by 70%, with universal credit wreaking absolute havoc on housing costs and with 1 million properties unfit for occupation, why do the new figures reveal that there are 1 million people with no access to a legal aid-provided housing lawyer at all and 15 million people in areas where there is only one provider, raising huge issues of capacity and potentially conflicts of interest? Will the review of the Legal Aid, Sentencing and Punishment of Offenders Act 2012, when we finally get to see it, address that issue so that people everywhere in the country can have access to the legal aid services they need?

[Lucy Frazer]

The hon. Lady is right to identify the fact that dealing with housing issues is important. As at today’s date, there is at least one provider offering housing and debt services in all the 134 procurement areas except for seven, and the Legal Aid Agency is doing what it can to ensure that appropriate services are available in those seven areas. It is due to launch a further tender in areas where there is currently low access to services, and that tender will begin on 17 December.

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.

--- Later in debate ---

[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?

Legal Aid: Post-Implementation Review

Karen Buck Excerpts

Tuesday 4th September 2018 Westminster Hall

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

I beg to move,

That this House has considered legal aid and the post-implementation review.

It is a pleasure to introduce this important debate under your chairmanship, Sir Christopher.

We cannot have meaningful rights without the means of enforcing them, and we cannot have meaningful justice if people have no way of accessing it. Legal aid lies at the heart of both those assertions, which is why I very much welcome the Government’s review of the Legal Aid, Sentencing and Punishment of Offenders Act 2012 six years on, and the opportunity to ask the Minister about the review’s process and substance. If she is unable to answer all my questions—I suspect she may not be able to—I would be grateful if she agreed to write to me so that we have answers on the record.

A few weeks ago, the Joint Committee on Human Rights, of which I am a member, published its report, “Enforcing human rights,” as a contribution to the wider debate. It stated:

“Access to justice is fundamental to the rule of law. We are concerned that the reforms to legal aid introduced by the Legal Aid, Sentencing and Punishment of Offenders Act 2012 (LASPO) have made access to justice more difficult for many, for whom it is simply unaffordable.”

Six years on from the Act’s passage, it is clear that the system is in crisis. Cuts to the Ministry of Justice were higher than to any other Department, at 40%. The impact of cuts on that scale is simply unsustainable.

The review of the changes must provide answers—not rhetorical answers and warm words, but practical solutions. Such solutions were set out in the Committee’s report, as they have been in expert report after expert report by bodies from the Bach review—I pay particular tribute to Lord Bach—to the Law Commission, and in evidence from the frontline of civil and criminal law. Solutions were also set out in excellent briefings for the debate from the Legal Aid Practitioners Group—I particularly praise the work of the extraordinary Carol Storer, who has been in charge of the LAPG for the past decade, and her team— the Equality and Human Rights Commission, to which I will make particular reference, the Law Society, Mind, the Families Together coalition, the Children’s Society, the Coram Children’s Legal Centre and many others.

I will ask about some of the specific points arising from all those briefings, but let me first ask about the review process. The review is currently under way, with a deadline of the end of this month for the submission of evidence and engagement with stakeholders. I put on the record my appreciation for officials’ engagement with the all-party parliamentary group on legal aid, which I chair, but there are a number of wider concerns about the transparency of the process.

No minutes have been published of the meetings that have been held. We understand that no independent research has been commissioned either. Will the Minister confirm whether that is the case? Will she also confirm that the report will definitely be published by the end of the year? How long does she estimate it will take the Government to respond? Critically, what will happen next? Will the review be affected in any way by Brexit? How long will the response take? What steps will be put in place to safeguard the current situation and prevent more providers from closing before there is an opportunity for recommendations arising out of the review to be implemented?

Let me return to the substantial issues that confront us in the post-LASPO world. We hope that many will be addressed by the review, and hopes are high, given the pressure under which many legal aid services are operating. LASPO narrowed considerably the scope of legal aid, with the result that it is no longer available for most private family, housing, debt, welfare benefit and employment matters. LASPO also changed the financial eligibility criteria for legal aid, including by increasing the amount that people have to contribute from their income and by removing automatic eligibility for people on means-tested benefits.

I could have filled my allocated time with any number of comments made to me by individual lawyers prior to the debate, but I picked one at random relating to housing, which I am particularly concerned about. I was contacted this morning by Russell Conway, a housing lawyer with Oliver Fisher, who said:

“Legal Aid lawyers are hanging on by the skin of their teeth. Worse still large numbers of clients cannot get access. Yesterday I turned away 10 prospective housing clients as their cases were no longer within scope”.

The latest statistics relating to the provision of legal aid confirm exactly that. Total legal aid expenditure has fallen by £600 million since 2013. The number of legal aid and controlled legal representation claims fell from 188,643 to 92,124—in other words, they halved. Mediation starts more than halved, and the number of providers has plunged by 800 in criminal law and 1,200 in civil law. It is no wonder that when the Joint Committee looked at the impact of LASPO on access to justice, concerns about advice deserts—parts of the country where advice and representation are close to non-existent—featured strongly.

In summary, legal aid is no longer available to many of those who need it. Even those eligible for help find it hard to access it, and major gaps in services are not being addressed. As is so often the case, the most disadvantaged and the disempowered bear the burden. To take just one group, important research by the mental health charity Mind found that half the people facing legal problems that were removed from the scope of legal aid by LASPO have mental health problems.

As LASPO removed significant areas of law from the scope of legal aid, exceptional case funding was brought in as a safety valve for more complex cases, such as where funding is deemed necessary to prevent a breach of human rights. Exceptional case funding was expected to support between 5,000 and 7,000 cases a year, but there were only 70 successful grants in the year after LASPO was introduced. Although that funding has picked up to some degree, it clearly has not fulfilled its intended function. We need to be reassured that addressing it will be core to the review.

Both the Equality and Human Rights Commission and the Joint Committee on Human Rights raised grave concerns about discrimination cases, the implications for human rights and the disproportionate impact of legal aid cuts on access to justice for people with protected characteristics, including disabled people, children and migrants. I hope the Minister will join me in welcoming the Equality and Human Rights Commission’s report and the inquiry it announced yesterday. Although the timing of that inquiry means that its results will not feed directly into the Government review, I hope she reflects on what the commission is doing and why.

The Equality and Human Rights Commission drew attention to how the removal of most welfare benefits law from the scope of legal aid disproportionately affected disabled people. It flagged up the fact that the number of benefits disputes cases in which legal aid was granted fell by 99% post-LASPO, from 29,801 in 2011-12, to just 308 in 2016-17. When individuals are able to challenge benefits decisions, the majority are overturned. Since 2013, 63% of appeals against personal independence payment decisions and 60% of appeals against employment and support allowance decisions have been decided in the claimant’s favour.

The Equality and Human Rights Commission also drew attention to the fact that the removal of most private family law from the scope of legal aid affects women disproportionately, and of course the removal of most immigration law impacts people from certain ethnic minorities. As the EHRC report states, many of the areas of law removed from the scope of legal aid cover issues central to domestic and international human rights protections. Restrictions on the availability of legal aid carry the real risk of preventing the enjoyment of fundamental rights and freedoms, especially when the practical effect of such measures is to hinder, dissuade or deny access to legal redress where individual rights have been violated.

The EHRC cited specifically the effects in family law or immigration cases that may involve violations of the right to respect for family life under article 8 of the European convention on human rights; in education cases where the removal of provision presents barriers to justice for those seeking redress for breaches of the right to an education, which is protected by article 2, protocol 1 of the convention; and in social welfare law cases, the removal of many of which from the scope of legal aid carries implications for the UK’s international obligations under the international covenant on economic, social and cultural rights.

The Minister will be very aware of the concerns that have been raised about the operation of the civil legal advice mandatory telephone gateway, which is often the only way for a victim of discrimination to access the legal aid system. Somehow, just 16 people have been referred to face-to-face advice in the past five years, despite more than 18,000 discrimination cases coming through the telephone gateway and an estimate that the referral rate would be 10%. Why does the Minister think that is?

Is the Minister able to say how many people with protected characteristics, including mental health problems, have been denied legal aid since the introduction of LASPO? Will the LASPO review include an assessment of the impact of legal aid reforms on groups with protected characteristics? What assessment has the Department made of the number of those people with protected characteristics who have been forced to represent themselves in court since the introduction of LASPO? Will the review consider reintroducing to the scope of legal aid those issues most commonly experienced by vulnerable individuals?

Powerful evidence of how LASPO affects children has been submitted by the Children’s Society and Coram Children’s Legal Centre, among others. They and I greatly welcome the MOJ’s decision to bring back into scope non-asylum immigration advice for unaccompanied and separated children’s immigration matters before the end of 2018, yet many other children and young people with outstanding immigration matters—particularly children with parents, and young people who are over 18—will continue to miss out.

The Government estimated 8,500 cases involving claimants aged 18 to 24 and around 43,000 cases involving claimants over 25 would go out of scope for immigration and asylum matters. No data were available on how many dependent children would be affected within those cases and I do not believe there has been any assessment since then. Is the Minister aware of such information? If not, will she ensure that such an assessment is carried out, so that we have accurate data on which to plan?

We know that the status children have can change easily and sometimes frequently. The lack of legal aid available for families to resolve their immigration status can mean children fall in and out of services, leaving them exposed to considerable risk. Undocumented children are often excluded from accessing mainstream benefits, secondary NHS healthcare and local authority homelessness assistance, and their parents are sometimes not allowed legally to work. Children in such families, care leavers and young adults who are over 18 with unresolved immigration issues are at serious risk of destitution and, at worst, abuse and exploitation, as a result of hardening immigration policies and cuts to legal aid.

That is just the situation today. It could soon get worse. There is a critical need to plan for a post-Brexit future, as millions of European economic area nationals, including children, need to settle their status in the United Kingdom. Although little is known about the immigration system post-Brexit, restrictions on the movement of EEA nationals are likely to mean that more children and families will become subject to immigration control in this country and therefore will need to regularise their status. That will include thousands of EEA children in local authority care and care leavers. Making legal aid available to those cases will be critical to protecting children’s rights.

Will the post-implementation review take account of the likely issues on the horizon, to ensure that they future-proof our system of access to justice and ensure that there is consistency in access to legal aid, to help to resolve the range of complex immigration circumstances and protect children, young people and families? Does the Minister know how many children in families and young adults have been affected by cuts to immigration legal aid since 2012? What assessment has she made of the availability of immigration advice regulated by the office of the Immigration Services Commissioner as a result of LASPO? What assessment has she made of the need for advice in areas where regulated immigration advice has dried up as a result of LASPO? What steps will she be taking to ensure that action is under way to deal with the issue of advice deserts?

The withdrawal of legal aid for initial legal advice in many areas of law can result in the escalation of relatively minor problems into more complex issues. There is a clear link between receiving professional legal advice early and resolving a problem sooner. Research commissioned by the Law Society using data from the legal needs survey found that on average one in four people who receive early professional legal advice had resolved their problem within three to four months, while one in four people who did not receive early legal advice had resolved their problem within nine months.

Lack of early legal advice can cause problems to escalate unnecessarily, potentially increasing the burden on the courts and increasing costs to the public purse. That has a clear impact on access to justice and the rule of law. The Government anticipated that people with legal problems in areas taken out of scope by LASPO would use alternative means of resolution. When removing legal aid for family matters, for example, the Government predicted that there would be increased uptake in mediation as an alternative, so that families could resolve their problems outside court. In fact, there has been a decrease of 56% in mediation assessments in the year after the reforms and the number of mediation cases that started fell by 38% in the same period. It may be that solicitors providing early advice referred people to mediation, so that removing access to such advice from a solicitor resulted in fewer, rather than more, cases being resolved that way. Has the Department conducted such research into the extent to which people have found alternative means of resolving disputes or obtaining representation? What research has been carried out or commissioned within the review looking at the cost of displacement to other services?

One obvious area of displacement is the rise in the number of litigants in person—people representing themselves in court. LASPO has resulted in an increase in litigants in person in family law proceedings, with 19,000 more unrepresented parties in 2016-17 than in 2012-13—up from 42% to 64% of such cases. Litigants in person often struggle to understand their legal entitlements and the complexities of court procedures. As the National Audit Office found, litigants in person are less likely to settle cases outside court, likely to have more court orders and interventions, likely to lack the knowledge and skills to conduct their cases efficiently, and create additional work for judges and court staff, which can make court listing processes less efficient. The Joint Committee on Human Rights report welcomed the fact that the Government are considering the impact of the increase on litigants in person, both in terms of outcomes for the individual concerned and on the court system. Has the Minister considered the recommendations of our report? Will she ensure they are reflected in the LASPO review?

Finally, the Joint Committee on Human Rights heard compelling evidence about the extent to which pressures caused by the reforms in legal aid impact on legal aid professionals. By damaging morale, and undermining the legal profession’s ability to undertake legal aid work, access to justice, the rule of law and the enforcement of human rights in the UK are further undermined. In the area of criminal law, data suggest that in five to 10 years’ time, there will be insufficient criminal duty solicitors in many regions of the country, leaving those in need of legal advice unable to access their rights.

I will quote just one message from the many that I was sent before this debate. A lady wrote to me to say that she has been a family lawyer and latterly a mediator for 35 years. She continued:

“Since 1996, I have been mediating under the legal aid scheme. I have always done legal aid work, as a solicitor as well as mediator…I will leave it to others to give facts and figures…I just want to put in a plea for the people who provide these services. We, the mediators, are paid the same rate as we received in 1996. This is no pay rise for 22 years…This has the consequence that services are not viable any longer. I have not had a pay rise for 22 years and carry on out of the goodness of my heart. Unless this issue is addressed, even if legal aid is reinstated in many cases, there will…not be the lawyers or the mediators to provide the service at all.”

Let us recognise that reality and praise those people who work so hard, frequently in very stressful environments and for precious little money, despite all the rhetoric about fat cat lawyers.

How is the review addressing the issue of future provision? How will any restoration of services be guaranteed when no new providers are operating in certain parts of the country? How many firms does the Minister estimate do not see a future for legal aid in their future business plans? How many legal aid lawyers expect to retire and how will they be replaced? What immediate steps are being taken to try to encourage young lawyers who want to do legal aid work to obtain training contacts and pupillages, and to overcome the reluctance of those with student debt burdens to enter into this work? Truthfully, it is impossible to wholly separate the impact of LASPO on those who need advice and representation from the needs of the people who provide that service. I hope that the Minister will reassure me that the review is considering the issue of pressures on those working in the sector and recruitment and retention, not just nationally, but across all parts of the country.

I doubt that many people working in legal aid will have been reassured by the contract debacle this weekend. It would be helpful if the Minister said something about how that is going to be swiftly resolved. Almost every aspect of the legal aid debacle was predicted and objected to at the time, hence the large number of defeats in the other place—only very minor, although welcome, adjustments have been made since. There is an opportunity in this review to learn from what has gone wrong and to put it right. The moment must be seized before it is too late.

Criminal Legal Aid

Karen Buck Excerpts

Tuesday 8th May 2018 Commons Chamber

[Richard Burgon]

My hon. Friend makes a powerful point. We cannot tolerate a situation where either the guilty walk free or the innocent go to prison.

The scheme fails to recognise the growing work required to deal with the increasing amount of evidential and unused material. Advocates are expected to consider that material without specific payments, however much additional material is served. That is especially worrying, given the fact that a series of trials, including rape trials, have recently collapsed because of failings in the disclosure of evidence.

Despite Government promises of cost neutrality, the CBA says that the scheme amounts to a £2 million cut, and no future-proofing is built into it, resulting in a year-on-year inflationary cut. The new scheme does not address the damage caused to the system by substantial real-terms cuts to legal aid rates over recent years of 40%. As a result of these reductions, there are pressing concerns about the ability to retain younger barristers and recruit the next generation into criminal defence work. After two decades without any sort of basic cost-of-living pay rise, criminal law is no longer an attractive career option for young solicitors or young barristers entering the system saddled with debt, and others are leaving because of the increasingly unreasonable demands made on them to do more and more for less and less.

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

My hon. Friend is making a powerful speech. On the issue of recruitment, is he not particularly concerned that if the Bar is to reflect the whole of society and is to draw more widely on people from less privileged backgrounds, black and minority ethnic backgrounds and so forth, it is essential that a career at the Bar is seen to provide a reasonable income?

[Richard Burgon]

My hon. Friend makes an important point. We are running the risk, with the path we have been taking in recent years in the justice sector, of the death knell being sounded on social mobility in the legal professions.

These changes also threaten the insufficient but none the less hard-won progress made on diversity and, as my hon. Friend says, social mobility. That has profound consequences, not just for people hoping for a career in the law but for public trust, as the judicial professions and institutions cease to reflect the communities they are there to serve. As Lady Justice Hallett has explained,

“cuts to legal aid and the publicly-funded criminal justice system will set back the cause of improving diversity on the bench.”

Criminal solicitors face similar problems with their fee scheme—the litigators graduated fee scheme. They have not received any fee increase since 1998, and the number of firms in England and Wales registered for criminal defence work has recently fallen from 1,600 to 1,200. The profession is in crisis, with an ageing demographic profile. In fact, new Law Society data paint a very bleak picture indeed of “advice deserts”, where the remaining criminal solicitors will retire and no younger solicitors are coming in to take their place. That is hardly surprising when Young Legal Aid Lawyers figures show that 53% of survey respondents earn less than £25,000 per year, and those figures relate to people qualified for up to 10 years.