Community Legal Service (Funding) (Amendment No. 2) Order 2011

Lord Newton of Braintree Excerpts

Wednesday 26th October 2011 Lords Chamber

I do not know whether my noble friend will be dividing the House tonight—it would, perhaps, be unusual for the House to divide on a statutory instrument of this kind—but if he does not, we will, of course, return to the greater issue, the substantive issue, of which this is the trailer, when we look at the legal aid Bill. If your Lordships’ House does not significantly amend that Bill, access to justice will be significantly diminished and there will be a significant diminution in the quality and breadth of the welfare state and the society which that great post-war Government sought to create and foster. I hope that the Government will think very carefully before they do further damage to something which, as the noble Lord, Lord Marks, said, we have all been proud of for the past 60 years.

[Lord Newton of Braintree]

My Lords, we live and learn. I apologise to my noble friend on the Front Bench for my slowness in getting up and, possibly, for what I am going to say. We live and learn: I always knew that I was more liberal than the previous Labour Government; I now know that I am more liberal than the Liberal Democrats, at least as represented in the House tonight. I hope that my noble friends on the Front Bench have not reached the stage of trembling when I stand up, because I am really quite a nice pussycat—in comparison with some, at any rate—but I can assure them that, were this to be pressed to a vote, I would not vote for it. I do not think that it is right for us to be killing off statutory instruments in the way that this would do, certainly with the way that the House operates at the moment. However, it is important that somebody from these Benches should make it clear that, even if we would not want to see this voted down, we are not happy bunnies about the policies that seem to underlie it. There are those of us, as I have already warned my long-suffering Whip and others, who are likely to want to return to some of these issues when we get to the Bill that is coming down the track towards us.

The speeches in this debate by the noble Lord, Lord Bach, the noble Baroness, Lady Deech, the noble and learned Lord, Lord Scott of Foscote, and others, including the noble Earl, Lord Listowel and the right reverend Prelate—in fact, everybody bar one, dare I say, who has spoken—have made a pretty devastating case. I will listen to the Minister’s answer. I am a notoriously pliable chap, and if I am convinced I will be prepared to change my view, but at the moment I think that they have made a pretty devastating case. I have only one question to add to those that have been asked, which is about mental health, where locking people up remains one of the areas where you can get legal aid for the mental health tribunal.

I think it is relevant that two years ago, when I was still chairing the Administrative Justice and Tribunals Council, the Ministry of Justice, under its former incumbents—or the officials, at any rate—asked the council, and me as its chair, to chair the user group for mental health tribunals. This is a little less comfortable for the Opposition Front Bench, but even at that stage, mental health lawyers were expressing the view that the cuts that had been made in legal aid remuneration were, at least in some parts of the country, making it virtually impossible to find people to represent those before the mental health tribunals. It was particularly true in the south-west; there were some concerns in the north-east, but there were certainly concerns, even with the policies that had previously been pursued. I therefore want to ask two questions of the Minister. Is mental health affected or potentially affected by this? What is the position on the availability of legal aid lawyers to help claimants who have been confronted by the prospect of being deprived of their liberty by mental health tribunals? This ties in with the point that the noble Lord, Lord Beecham, has just made very effectively. The net result of this may well be to reduce the amount of support available to vulnerable people, not only because legal aid is not available but because growing numbers of young lawyers who do pro bono work will not be able to afford to go on doing it. This is a worry for many law centres and the like. I should like some comment on that.