Legal Aid, Sentencing and Punishment of Offenders Act 2012

Lord Howarth of Newport Excerpts

Wednesday 10th June 2015 Lords Chamber

[Lord Faulks]

My Lords, the LASPO Act has not been a disaster. It was necessary to make some sensible and well-directed changes to legal aid. In social welfare, the most important cases concerning people’s housing and their ability to stay in their house are still within scope, but some of the lesser matters are not. Of course we keep the matter under review, but the noble Lord will know that the legal aid reforms did not take place until April 2013, there having been a spike before then. It is important to see how they are affecting people over the longer term, which is why this Government repeat what the previous coalition Government agreed, which is that we will look at the whole system in much more detail, but only within five years and not before.

[Lord Howarth of Newport (Lab)]

My Lords, given that the Ministry of Justice is one of the departments vulnerable to further depredations by the Chancellor in his drive for economy and to scale down the state, will the Lord Chancellor and his ministerial colleagues in the department this time round stand up to the Treasury and insist that equality before the law and equal access to justice are beyond price in our constitutional heritage and indispensible to a liberal society, and that they will defend them to the hilt?

[Lord Faulks]

I can assure the noble Lord and the House that all the Ministers in the Ministry of Justice are wedded to the rule of law and to access to justice. But the question that arises out of social welfare law is whether it is always necessary for everybody who has quite real problems to have a lawyer at £200-odd an hour, or whether there are better and more effective ways of giving advice.