Criminal Legal Aid (General) (Amendment) Regulations 2013

Lord Beecham Excerpts

Wednesday 29th January 2014 Lords Chamber

[Lord Beecham (Lab)]

My Lords, it is once again necessary for me to thank the noble Lord, Lord Pannick, for putting down a Motion of Regret about a set of regulations on legal aid. I also express my gratitude to all noble Lords who have spoken so powerfully tonight about the regulations and the potential damage that they will do.

I begin by citing three examples of successful cases for which legal aid was, but will no longer be, available. I am indebted to the Howard League for supplying the relevant information. The first was a mother and baby case of the kind referred to by the noble Lord, Lord Pannick, the noble Baroness, Lady Kennedy, and the noble and learned Baroness, Lady Butler-Sloss. A Spanish mother, who spoke no English, was informed after sentence that her baby would be removed and placed into care because it was not known whether she would be allowed to remain with the child when she returned to Spain. Her lawyers ascertained that she would, and the decision was reversed.

In the second case, a prisoner with severe learning disabilities could not do offending behaviour courses. Experts in the prison recommended he be transferred to hospital for treatment, but nothing happened until his lawyer commissioned an independent report and persuaded the authorities to transfer him to hospital. Such a sentence case will now be out of scope.

In the third case, a 17 year-old suffering from ADHD and learning difficulties underwent psychiatric therapy in a secure training centre, but the local authority refused to respond to a request for a needs assessment under Section 17 of the Children Act until legal intervention by the Howard League. Resettlement cases of this kind will also be out of scope. I remind your Lordships that the cost of keeping such an offender in custody could be as much as £200,000 a year.

Those are but a few sample cases. The regulations which are the subject of this regret Motion are merely the latest example of this Government’s repeated assaults on the legal aid system and access to justice, pushed through by a Lord Chancellor indifferent to their effects and unheeding of the warnings from the judiciary, practitioners, and charities and voluntary organisations. Time after time the criticisms of bodies such as the Justice Select Committee, the Secondary Legislation Scrutiny Committee and the Joint Committee on Human Rights are brushed aside. Impact analyses are vestigial in many cases, and imperfect in most.

Such is clearly the case with the proposals we are debating tonight. Not only are the measures deeply flawed but the process is tainted. Paragraph after paragraph of the Joint Committee on Human Rights report highlights these systemic failures. After their initial consultation, the Government abandoned proposals to exclude two areas from legal aid, namely where the Parole Board considers whether to order release and in relation to the calculation of sentence when the release date is in dispute. That is welcome, but as paragraph 154 of the report sets out, two new matters were excluded from legal aid—contrary to the express intention set out in the consultation that legal aid would continue to be available—namely, the areas of sentence planning and pre-tariff reviews. There was no subsequent consultation on these changes.

At paragraph 163, the committee dismissed the Lord Chancellor’s assertion that legal aid was being abused by prisoners complaining about what prison they were confined in, or about prison conditions, saying, damningly and accurately,

“legal aid is already unavailable for such claims”.

At paragraph 168, it pointed up the hollowness of the Government’s claim that judicial review would be available given the restrictions being imposed on the number of cases firms might bring and the limitations of the exceptional funding regime. At paragraph 169, it asked the Government to consider the combined effect of the residence test and the exceptional funding criteria and invited them to explain,

“how access to justice rights will be maintained where both policies are in operation”.

What is the Government’s response to that very significant question?

The Government airily dismissed the concerns on internal prison complaints but, as we have heard, the Chief Inspector of Prisons is quoted at paragraph 174 as finding the response “disappointing”. He emphasised the problems of prisoners with disabilities, especially mental health problems, and, as the noble Lord, Lord Ramsbotham, pointed out, warned that prisoner confidence in the complaints system was crucial to prison safety. As recent events have demonstrated, prison safety is a real concern. Similarly, at paragraph 174, the Prisons and Probation Ombudsman voiced concerns, especially about his lack of statutory independence that the Lord Chancellor has promised to rectify. I must ask the Minister when the legislation, urgently pressed for by the committee at paragraph 177, will be enacted.

At paragraph 181 the committee identified the need for public funding,

“to prevent infringements of prisoners’ right of access to court arising in practice”.

From paragraphs 182 to 188, it identified serious issues for prisoners with mental health problems, the vast majority exemplified by the chief inspector’s remarks in the case mentioned by the noble Baroness, Lady Stern, about segregation, in particular of women prisoners. In parenthesis, when I asked a question about women prisoners being held in segregation the reply that I received from the Ministry of Justice was that it was too costly to obtain the details of the numbers and length of time such women had been so confined. To his credit, the noble Lord, Lord McNally, agreed that the answer was ridiculous and procured the relevant information.

At paragraph 188, the Joint Committee noted that since 2010 the majority of treatment cases were mental health cases and it was not satisfied that these prisoners would be able to use the complaints procedure effectively. It recommended that the LAA retain the ability to grant funding for these cases where the implications for access to justice are clear. Noble Lords will not need reminding that the majority of prisoners suffer from mental health disorders: 70% of one or more mental health disorders for adults, 90% for young offenders. Again, what is the Government’s response to the case of prisoners suffering from these disorders? In relation to mother and baby cases, of which there are mercifully few, the committee called for an exemption in cases where legal representation would be desirable. Will the Government not accede to this request?

The concerns are echoed in relation to young offenders, as mentioned by the noble Lord, Lord Carlile, where, as the committee pointed out at paragraph 205, such matters, including in particular resettlement cases, are being removed even before the Government respond to their consultation paper, Transforming Youth Custody. Trenchantly at paragraph 206 the committee disagreed that advocacy services and internal complaints systems would be effective and asserted that:

“This could leave young people vulnerable and deny them their rights”.

This would be not least in key areas such as,

“housing law, social care law and public law”.

Moreover, it dismissed the young offender’s right to judicial review, which was raised by the Government, since a young offender would require a litigation friend to pursue the action; it cannot be brought by a minor on his own initiative. It urged the retention of young offender cases within scope, specifically resettlement cases. Finally, at paragraphs 213 and 218, as referred to by my noble friend Lord Bach, it recommended reconsideration of the position in relation to Parole Board hearings and categorisation cases. This is a formidable catalogue of concerns about, and in many cases outright opposition to, what the Government are doing.

Once again, the Minister will shortly stand at the Dispatch Box, like Horatius on the bridge, with no troops behind him. There is not a single voice that has been raised in this Chamber tonight in support of the Government’s position. It would be unfair to suggest that the Minister, who was a member of the JCHR and presumably agreed with its report, has changed his mind now that he has taken if not the Queen’s shilling, then at least the Lord Chancellor’s shilling, if only because he is not being paid a shilling or indeed anything else for the job that he has undertaken. But I hope that he can prevail upon the Government to think again, and quickly, about the direction and extent of travel reflected in these regulations.

I commend to him in particular the response of the Bingham Centre for the Rule of Law to these issues. The centre does not,

“share the Government’s view that treatment cases will never be of sufficient priority to justify the use of public funds, or that sentencing matters such as categorisation and segregation are considered incapable of warranting legal aid”.

Importantly, it dismisses the so-called “adequate alternatives” to which the Government refer—for example, the complaints system and the ombudsman—as “first ports of call”, in the MoJ’s phrase, for four substantial reasons.

First, as per the noble and learned Lord, Lord Brown, whom I welcome back to the side of the angels after his digression over the issues of miscarriages of justice and compensation, the courts require alternative remedies to be exhausted before seeking judicial review, so legal aid would not be the first port of call. Secondly, under the regulations, the non-judicial remedies would be the only point of call. Thirdly,

“the rule of law requires the possibility, at least as a last resort, of recourse to independent courts”,

and, fourthly,

“rule-of-law imperative is particularly compelling in settings—of which prisons are a paradigm example—in which individuals are subject to the exercise of highly coercive public law powers”.

The centre concluded by affirming that,

“judicial review has exerted a profound and positive influence upon the prison system in recent decades … the nature of any state’s prison system … is a key barometer of the rule of law”.

Tellingly, it adds:

“It is inevitable that the proposals, if implemented, would substantially undermine the valuable role played by courts in this area. If one of public law’s core functions is to safeguard vulnerable individuals against misuses of state authority, then it is hard to think of a more fundamental assault upon the capacity of public law to perform such a role”—

and all the more so when the custodial services are contracted out to oligopolies such as G4S and Serco.

What answer does the Minister have to this critique? Does he agree with the words uttered by Winston Churchill—who has already been quoted here tonight—as Home Secretary in 1910, when he said:

“A calm and dispassionate recognition of the rights … even of convicted criminals against the State … tireless efforts towards the discovery of curative and regenerating processes … are the symbols which in the treatment of crime and criminals mark and measure the stored-up strength of a nation, and are the sign and proof of the living virtue in it”?—[Official Report, Commons, 20/7/1910; col. 1354.]

Is the Minister, and are the Government, willing to disavow Churchill’s characteristically eloquent formulation of principle for the sake of a possible, but actually unlikely, saving of £4 million a year?

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

My Lords, I hope that I can rise to the challenge of the “calm and dispassionate” response to which the noble Lord referred in his closing remarks. This has been a wide-ranging debate, involving very distinguished speakers with great knowledge and awareness of many of the issues which these regulations raise. I hope that the House will forgive me if, in the course of this dinner-hour debate, I do not respond to all the many criticisms that have been made but try to focus on the effect of the regulations and on why the Government have seen fit to bring them into effect.

I will begin by saying something about the wider context of the instrument. It is worth noting that spending on criminal legal aid for prison law in England and Wales has increased markedly in recent years, from around £1 million in 2001-02 to around £22 million in 2012-13.

Legal aid is a vital part of our justice system. However, limited public resources need to be targeted at those who need them most. With departments across government being asked to reduce their expenditure, legal aid cannot be immune. The legal aid scheme is paid for by the taxpayer, and we have to demonstrate to the public and hard-working families that we have scrutinised every aspect of legal aid spending to ensure that it can be justified. Unless the legal aid scheme is targeted at the people and cases where funding is most needed, it will not command public confidence. It was with this aim in mind that the Government proposed a number of changes to legal aid in England and Wales in April 2013. Following public consultation and careful consideration of the responses, the decision was taken to restrict the scope of criminal legal aid for prison law, among other reforms.

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There was also a suggestion that the Prisons and Probation Ombudsman did not have the resources to deal with its role. We expect that the majority of cases that are removed from scope will be resolved via the prisoner complaints system, prisoner discipline proceedings or the probation complaints systems. These are, we suggest, robust systems designed to deal with serious issues of concern for prisoners or those released on licence. Only those cases that cannot be satisfactorily resolved via these processes, which we expect to be a small number, will be referred to the ombudsman. Prisoners may also refer their case to the independent monitoring board.

[Lord Beecham]

I am sorry to interrupt the Minister, but at paragraph 175 of its report the committee says specifically:

“the Prisons and Probation Ombudsman … told us about his concerns with the Government’s proposal, particularly in relation to his lack of statutory independence and his office’s ability to deal with any increased workload”.

How does the Minister square that with the assurance that he has just given?

[Lord Faulks]

The assurance that I have just given is that the Government take the view that it will be rare that there will be any need to refer to the Prisons and Probation Ombudsman. However, the Ministry of Justice intends to put the PPO on a statutory footing as soon as legislative time permits. I note that the Joint Committee on Human Rights noted—and this must be in the same section to which the noble Lord referred—that the PPO has himself “acknowledged that his recommendations”, while not binding, are in fact “always accepted”.

There was understandable anxiety about mental health issues and learning difficulties for young offenders. The Government are of course extremely concerned with young offenders and their rehabilitation. I could give a detailed response, but that would be outside the scope of this debate, which is concerned with legal aid. That issue is a matter of continuing concern to the House, and indeed to the Government, just as the position with mental health issues is also a concern. I accept that many prisoners have a background with mental health issues.

Noble Lords may ask what is done to screen prisoners for mental health problems. As part of the early days in custody process, all prisoners are risk-assessed for potential harm to themselves and to others and from others. All incoming prisoners are given a medical examination to identify any short-term or long-term physical or mental health needs, including disability, drug or alcohol issues, and to ensure that follow-up action is taken.

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That is the Government’s response to the Motion of Regret. I am extremely grateful to all noble Lords who have illuminated this debate with their many and widespread concerns for prisoners, but I respectfully ask the noble Lord to withdraw his Motion.

[Lord Beecham]

Before the Minister sits down, can he tell the House if and when the Government will be publishing their response to the Joint Committee report of 13 December?

[Lord Faulks]

I cannot I am afraid give an exact date for that, but I shall take back the noble Lord’s concern and I will write to him when I have information. Of course, it is a matter that will be taken very seriously at the Ministry of Justice.