Legal Aid, Sentencing and Punishment of Offenders Bill

Debate between Lord Clarke of Nottingham and Nigel Evans

Tuesday 17th April 2012 Commons Chamber

[The Lord Chancellor and Secretary of State for Justice (Mr Kenneth Clarke)]

I beg to move, That this House disagrees with Lords amendment 2.

[Mr Deputy Speaker (Mr Nigel Evans)]

With this it will be convenient to discuss the following:

Lords amendments 189 to 191.

Lords amendment 192, Government motion to disagree, and Government amendments (a) to (c) in lieu.

Lords amendment 193.

Lords amendments 194 and 196, and Government motions to disagree.

Lords amendments 217 to 220 and 243.

Lords amendment 168 and Government motion to disagree.

Lords amendment 169 and 240, Government motions to disagree, Government amendments (a) and (b) in lieu, and amendment (i) to Government amendment (a).

Lords amendments 170 to 172, and Government motions to disagree.

Lords amendments 177 to 181, and 206 to 216.

[Mr Clarke]

Lords amendment 2 impinges on the financial privileges of the House. I ask the House to disagree to the amendment and I will ask the Reasons Committee to ascribe financial privilege as the reason for doing so—and so too with amendments 168, 170 and 171. In addressing the very wide selection that you have just announced, Mr Deputy Speaker, I shall begin by looking at the principles that the Government are adopting on the various amendments and the reform as a whole, and at what principles we are inviting the House to adopt.

The scope of legal aid goes to the heart of our attempts to reform and improve the justice system, because targeting funding where it really counts is fundamental, first to the savings the Government are having to try to make in this area as in any other. There is no doubt that the present level of legal aid provision is on any measure unaffordably expensive. I shall not dwell on this issue but it is bound to recur during our debates. Even after our reforms have been carried, if Parliament eventually approves the Bill and it becomes an Act as we intend, we will still have by far the most costly legal aid system in the world. It is almost twice as expensive as that in any other country per head of population. In no other democratic jurisdiction would it be possible to get up and argue seriously that the taxpayer should spend money on the scale that we do on legal representation and advice.

The changes to the scope of legal aid that we are proposing are also part of a broader shift. We are trying to reduce the amount of unnecessarily adversarial litigation. The very broad provision of legal aid has encouraged people to bring their problems before the courts, but sometimes their basic problem is not a legal one and the best way of resolving the dispute or tackling the problem would be not to take a litigious approach. Such an approach imposes costs and does not always resolve problems. Before I move on from the tricky matter of cost let me say that with legal aid the cost is not just to the public purse and our Department. One has to think of the costs imposed on all the other people who are parties to litigation, such as businesses—small and medium-sized enterprises—and the national health service, as this selection includes clinical negligence claims. Everything we agree to do in relation to clinical negligence comes out of the budget that is otherwise available for public services. The growth of the clinical negligence industry is having an impact on national health services at the present time. There is also a cost to individuals, because for an ordinary citizen of ordinary means to be in the appalling situation of being engaged in litigation when the other party has legal aid is not an experience that most people would enjoy. We should bear all that in mind as the background to what we are doing.

Legal Aid, Sentencing and Punishment of Offenders Bill

Debate between Lord Clarke of Nottingham and Nigel Evans

Wednesday 29th June 2011 Commons Chamber

[Mr Deputy Speaker (Mr Nigel Evans)]

Order. May I remind the House how many Members wish to contribute? Our mission should be to limit our interventions.

[Mr Clarke]

I have already said that access to justice is fundamental, but the fact is that the taxpayer’s money cannot be used to give access to justice to large numbers of people in large areas of law where the ordinary citizen would not contemplate litigating because the ordinary citizen on an ordinary income would not think that they could afford to embark on it. That is why we consulted very carefully. We concentrated on vulnerable people and on those areas that were of such importance that society as a whole would plainly feel that there was a need to finance people of limited means so that they could have access to justice. I ask the right hon. Lady to judge all our proposals on that basis. Lady Hale seemed to think that we were abolishing other access on the basis that people were using it too much. That is not the reason. But we do have a system that is four times as expensive as that of New Zealand. We have to concentrate the mind and decide what it is justified to expect the taxpayer to pay for.