Legal Aid

Lord Bach Excerpts

Tuesday 31st January 2012 Lords Chamber

Asked By

[Lord Bach]

To ask Her Majesty’s Government what assessment they have made of the implications of legal aid cuts for law centres.

[The Minister of State, Ministry of Justice (Lord McNally)]

My Lords, the equality impact assessments lay out the best estimates of the likely costs and benefits of the reforms. The equality impact assessment considers the financial implications for not-for-profit providers, of which law centres are an example.

[Lord Bach]

My Lords, I thank the Minister for his reply. Everyone agrees what a vital and civilising role law centres perform around our country. Everyone agrees that early legal advice solves problems, helps people, changes lives and often saves costly and unnecessary cases going to court. The effect of taking social welfare law out of scope will be to reduce the funding for legal help by law centres by 85.8 per cent. Law centres will inevitably close and many thousands of people, often the poor and marginalised, will be left without access to justice. Even the TaxPayers’ Alliance chairman wrote:

“Almost everyone who has looked at these particular cuts thinks that too many of them will end up costing taxpayers more than they save”.

Does the Minister agree with that analysis, and would it not be an absurd and wrong result if we should end up spending more public money in order to make our country less just and less civilised?

[Lord McNally]

My Lords, the noble Lord will not expect me to agree with that analysis, which has been his constant theme during the passage of the LASPO Bill, and I suspect will continue to be, based on a worst-case scenario. We are restructuring legal aid and that will have an impact on the not-for-profit sector. We have never resiled from that. However, we also appreciate the benefits of the not-for-profit sector, which is why we provided £107 million in transitional funds and an additional £20 million to help the sector restructure for the new framework of legal aid and legal services that the reforms are intended to bring about. I do not accept the worst-case scenario that has been the basis of the noble Lord's arguments throughout the passage of the Bill.