Legal Aid

Lord Clinton-Davis Excerpts

Thursday 11th July 2013 Lords Chamber

[Lord Clinton-Davis]

My Lords, I apologise at the outset for my late arrival, but I will not go further into that.

When I was a young solicitor, many moons ago, legal aid was viable from the point of view of both lawyers and clients. It represented an important part of our social services, and that situation endured for many years. Today all branches of legal aid have been drastically reduced and more is threatened, but will there be a substantial reduction in expenditure, as the Government predict?

With regard to criminal legal aid, while a large amount is spent on exceptional, long and complex cases, it is idle to assume that the remainder of people on trial—the largest proportion by far—will not suffer increasingly. So will all this result in savings? Is it not possible that, in consequence, trials will take even longer? Will unrepresented defendants not take much longer to make their points, or fail to distinguish between the good, the partially good and the virtually unarguable?

One of the most odious ideas concerning legal aid, coming from a department where senior Ministers are “lawyer-free”, is that a criminal defendant will have to be represented by a lawyer selected by the Government. In my view, this offends a basic tenet of the criminal law. However well qualified the lawyer—and that may be open to doubt—a defendant may believe that they have been foisted upon him or her, for somewhat dubious reasons. This proposal may never come to fruition, of course, and indeed I hope not, but it remains a possibility and a threat.

The Government certainly face some difficult problems in the sphere of criminal legal aid but the wrong solutions should not be sought, and not everything can be solved by assailing lawyers’ fees. Legal aid in both the civil and criminal sectors still represents a vital part of our social services, yet the Government resist that concept. It is puerile to conceive that little or no damage will follow the severe and often ill thought-out cuts that the Government have set their heart on.

The Government should say to the legal profession, “We want to work closely with you but it’s not a one-way street. We both want to make our legal aid system work more efficiently and cheaply, and we are prepared to listen to your views as well”. Are the Government prepared to take that course? Are they ready to abandon political and unworkable nostrums in return for sensible debate? I fear not. However, I still say to the Government: think again, and think wisely.