Bach Commission: The Right to Justice

Lord Goldsmith Excerpts

Thursday 14th December 2017 Lords Chamber

[Lord Goldsmith (Lab)]

My Lords, when my noble friend Lord Bach started this debate, he reminded us that access to justice needs to be effective for it to achieve what it is supposed to achieve. Although we all believe in it, as with the rule of law there is a real danger of not doing what is necessary to make it happen. I pay tribute to my noble friend, the other members of the commission and all who assisted him with this report. Here we have some practical solutions.

I want to identify and focus on the problems that real people experience as a result of the lack of access to justice. I do that by drawing attention not to what the effect of the cuts to legal aid has been on the legal profession but to the effect on the voluntary agencies that provide so much advice to people who desperately need it.

Let me give noble Lords one example. The House will recall, I hope, that one consequence of LASPO has been not just to cut the earnings of lawyers in private practice but to reduce the revenue available to law centres and legal advice centres. One such law centre is the Haringey Law Centre, with which my firm partners—I disclose that interest. Following LASPO, its staff numbers were reduced from 15 to five, yet it still supported almost 3,000 Haringey residents a year, of whom, not surprisingly, a large proportion are BME, unemployed or disabled. Further cuts in 2016 meant that Haringey was nearly forced to close. It stayed open only because several key staff members continued to work without pay. That is only one example. The Law Centres Network has reported that law centres suffered a 60% loss in legal aid revenue due to LASPO. That is producing a situation in which people cannot get the assistance that they desperately need, not in grand public law cases or private litigation, but in areas of everyday life—employment, benefits, housing—which matter enormously to the people in this country.

I declare an interest as the chairman of the Access to Justice Foundation, an organisation supported and set up by all elements of the legal profession to collect money and fund through grants law centres, legal advice centres and those agencies and people that provide legal services pro bono. But there is a desert of legal advice. The Law Society has identified that almost one-third of legal aid areas have just one, and in some cases not even one, law firm that provides housing advice.

The recommendation of my noble friend’s commission for a right to justice Act is to be commended, and I support him in that. However, it should not detract from the other practical recommendations that his report makes; those can be got on with straightaway. Like others in this House, I look forward to hearing the Minister and others indicate what is going to be done about this in practical terms.

Supported though it is by four former Lords Chief Justice—if that is the correct plural—this debate must not become an end-of-term, teatime debate. It needs to drive forward real reform. Last year, almost 1 million people were not helped by legal aid who would have been helped in 2013. That illustrates the extent of the demand. While it may be possible to make many important changes to our justice system to make it more effective, efficient or cheaper, none of that should delay the need for assistance for the people towards whom my noble friend’s report is directed. I commend the report and look forward to hearing what the Minister has to say about what the Government intend to do to deal with it.