Legal Aid

Lord Bach Excerpts

Thursday 11th July 2013 Lords Chamber

[Lord Bach]

My Lords, not for the first time the House owes a debt of gratitude to the noble Baroness, Lady Deech. By securing this important debate, she has not only obliged the Government to defend their past conduct and current proposals in Parliament, something that I suspect they are not overkeen on doing, but she has attracted a stellar cast of speakers, and not just great lawyers and judges. I pay special tribute to the noble and learned Lord, Lord Hope, whom it is great to see back in his place in this House again. There are others here who are not lawyers who recognise just how important these matters are to our whole way of life and our status as a civilised country.

The debate takes place in the middle of a lovely summer afternoon, and many who are outside will be more interested in getting some sunshine or finding out how the Ashes are going. But we would be foolish to underrate how many out there are listening one way or another to what we are saying and, in particular, to what the Minister will say in due course. There is a lot at stake here.

The Government’s latest proposals, following on frighteningly fast from the implementation of part 1 of LASPO, have been the subject of sustained and deadly attack during this debate. For example, my noble and learned friend Lord Irvine effectively pulled apart the proposals for judicial review, particularly the residence test, revealing it as a tawdry ideological assault on the rule of law and the Lord Chancellor’s duty to uphold it.

The Lord Chancellor himself let it slip, in his session at the House of Commons Justice Committee last week, that it was not cost savings that underlay these proposals, it was “ideological”: that word was used. Does the Minister agree? Is it part of his ideology too that if there was a case in the future like, for example, the Baba Mousa one, it should be outside the scope of legal aid? Or does the Minister still stick to the line that it is the costs that justify these proposals, though the Dr Armstrong paper referred to earlier demolishes the costs argument pretty conclusively as far as JR is concerned?

Is it the philosophy that the right to legal aid—and thus the ability to make a claim against a state—should be based on the status of the claimant? Is our system, with its grand tradition of protecting the rights of all, to become so diminished that it will not allow justice, where it is necessary, for all those who need it? As far as I am concerned, these proposals are much more dog-whistle politics than they are thought-out legal proposals. The Government sometimes give the impression that they are careless about the importance of ensuring access to justice. They would, perhaps, like us to forget what has already been done in the name of cost-savings or ideology or both.

We are three months into LASPO and the Government intend to have post-legislative scrutiny within three to five years of Royal Assent. What will they find? If the first three months are anything to do with it—and they should have been the easiest months—there will be practically nothing left apart from, perhaps, a few providers dotted around the country with vast deserts of no social welfare law provision at all: a sort of wasteland. Let us look briefly at the evidence. Birmingham Law Centre has closed down and advice is not being given on 2,000 cases of social welfare law each year. Will the Government consider saving Birmingham Law Centre in the same way as the Government of whom I was proud to be a member saved South West London Law Centre when it was in difficulties?

The Mary Ward Centre, which has given 100 years of service to the poor in London, is now turning away 15 people each week. It has no contracts in benefit cases because that is out of scope. It has four debt cases where there were 400 this time last year. What are poor Londoners going to do when the Mary Ward Centre cannot look after them? The Government cannot hide their eyes from this. Social welfare law helped hundreds of thousands of people who were given quality advice on legal issues that affected their everyday lives, for less than one tenth of the whole cost of legal aid. Lawyers did not get rich on it, but poor people got some access to justice.

George Orwell wrote:

“Whether the British ruling class is wicked or merely stupid is one of the most difficult questions of our time”.

Perhaps only an old Etonian could have put it in those terms. Of course Ministers are not wicked—indeed, in my experience, they are pretty nice people who mean well. But Part 1 of LASPO, taking away the possibility of many of our poorest citizens getting some access to justice, is pretty close to the second word that he used.

Ministers should think again before it is too late. I do not hesitate to use the quotation which was used many times in the LASPO argument. It is from the late Lord Bingham who said that,

“the denial of legal protection to the poor litigant who cannot afford to pay is one enemy of the rule of law”.

That is what this debate has been arguing.