Civil Legal Aid

Lord Haskel Excerpts

Thursday 19th May 2011 Lords Chamber

[Lord Haskel]

My Lords, normally I do not trouble your Lordships on legal matters—they are way above my station. I normally speak on more lowly matters such as business and industry, science and technology. But on this occasion I felt that my noble friend's case was so strong and so compelling that I wanted to show my support. So with apologies to noble and learned Lords for trespassing on their territory, let me try to put this case in a way that we practical people see things.

The first thing that we look at are the numbers. Legal aid is a big number and is paid by a small department, the Ministry of Justice. Is this a true picture? In the world of business, we are pretty good at presenting numbers so as to project the impression that we want to give. Is this being done here?

Many noble Lords have spoken of legal aid in health, housing, employment and criminal negligence. Surely these are matters for their respective government departments, not all for the Ministry of Justice. If legal aid costs were allocated to these various departments, surely the costs would become much smaller—they would become minuscule. So I put it to the Minister that if the costs were allocated differently, the numbers might tell a different story.

We technologists are very keen on understanding the theory behind things, how they work and why they happen. We like to understand the cause so that we can foresee the effect. If there is a theory that we cannot understand, we rather think that there is something phoney behind it.

So what is the theory behind cutting legal aid? We know the effect, but what is the cause? Justifying it simply by the need to save money, as I think the noble Lord, Lord Faulks, was doing, is intellectually very weak. It will be to the lasting shame of this Government if we come to look back on things and say that the only reason that we could find was that we could not afford it. So can the Minister be intellectually more robust and explain these civil legal aid cuts in terms of the rights and wrongs of civil legal aid rather than just saying that we cannot afford it?

In my world, we are very keen on testing, both in theory and in practice. We are very suspicious of things that are done in a blinding rush before they can be tested, because that is the way that mistakes are made.

Now, we all know why this Government are in a rush. They have read Tony Blair's book, where he says that his biggest regret is that he did not get on with doing things straightaway. What he did not say in his book is that we spent a lot of time thinking and discussing our way through problems, looking at alternatives, consulting, learning from other people’s experience and trying out different ideas in White Papers and Green Papers so that the best one won, so that policies such as Sure Start came out of several false starts.

Everybody in my world thinks that that is the best way of ensuring success. I find this careful preparation and testing absent in the Government’s attitude towards civil legal aid. Surely we owe it to those who depend on it to search for alternative solutions, such as the reduction in costs mentioned by my noble friend Lord Beecham or the matters referred to by my noble friend Lady Sherlock and the noble Lord, Lord Thomas.

Other noble Lords have spoken about injustice, about unfairness, and they are of course absolutely right to raise it. But in my world we seek fairness not only because it is morally right but because, once it is absent, harm starts to happen. In the practical business world, when harm starts to happen, things start to go rapidly downhill. Purely to avoid trouble, will the Minister review the fairness and the injustice of the Government's decision?

It may well be that the Government do not care for that section of the community that depends on legal aid, so all the things that we have said do not really matter. But I do not think that that is the kind of society that we want to live in. It certainly matters to me.