Social Welfare Law

Lord Carlile of Berriew Excerpts

Wednesday 29th June 2011 Lords Chamber

[Lord McNally]

My Lords, under our proposals, legal aid will be retained in the highest priority housing cases, where a person’s home is at immediate risk, for homelessness, serious disrepair, unlawful eviction, orders for the sale of the home, and asylum support cases relating to accommodation. Legal aid will be available in debt matters where a person’s home is at immediate risk. We will still be spending about £50 million a year on this section of legal aid.

I have read the comments of the noble and learned Baroness, Lady Hale. I have said from this Dispatch Box that if you have a policy that is aimed at the poorest in our society and you cut the budget, of course there will be an inevitable impact. But in trying to develop this policy we have tried to minimise that impact and focus our resources on those most in need.

[Lord Carlile of Berriew]

My Lords, would my noble friend like to take a short journey down to the Lambeth County Court and other comparable courts in London, Manchester, Sheffield and other cities, where he would find if he spent half a day there that the only way in which to get your house repaired is to sue the local council? All other measures to obtain house repairs are not succeeding. He would then perhaps realise that limiting legal aid to quite the extent which the Government are ambitious to limit it is going a step too far.

[Lord McNally]

Well, I hear what my noble friend is saying. The department was faced with some very hard decisions on a £2 billion cut in a department which, as I have said before, has expenditure on only four areas—prisons, probation, legal aid and on the administration of justice. We have tried to focus where we can on areas of need. I was very interested in the editorial in the Guardian on legal aid, which was headed, “Unjust cuts”. In the course of that editorial, it said:

“It is now being examined for the eighth time since the Children Act 1989”.

The noble Lord knows very well that his own Administration were looking hard at legal aid and how to cut it. It went on:

“The need for reform, and for a more cost-effective system, is undisputed … Professionals acknowledge that too many of these cases come to court, and welcome the proposal for greater use of mediation … Change is needed. There are savings to be made”.

That is under the title of “Unjust cuts”. Those are the realities that we are facing.