Legal Aid and Civil Costs Reform

Lord Phillips of Sudbury Excerpts

Monday 15th November 2010 Lords Chamber

[Lord McNally]

My Lords, I can give some limited encouragement. It is true that the law centre movement and other such bodies, which rely on certain cases of legal aid, will have difficulties with this Statement. I also think that there are likely to be difficulties for the CABs which, as the noble Lord indicates, face the problem of the impact of cuts in local authority funding and the likely loss of legal-aid work in the legal advice that they cover. My right honourable friend the Lord Chancellor is fully seized of these problems and is very willing, during the period of consultation, to talk to those bodies and to explore alternative assistance and funding. The noble Lord points to the real impact made by the decisions that we have taken.

[Lord Phillips of Sudbury]

My Lords—

[Lord Maclennan of Rogart]

My Lords, I welcome the reference to promoting alternative dispute resolution to accelerate and simplify the resolution of disputes. Can my noble friend indicate what the criteria are to be where exceptional funding for excluded cases is awarded? In particular, will he recognise that it is an issue not just for the excluded individual but for the courts, because if a case is of a particular complexity it can clog up the courts: a point that was made by a former Lord Chief Justice and a former Master of the Rolls when a previous Conservative Government cut legal aid?

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[Lord Phillips of Sudbury]

My Lords—

[Baroness Kennedy of The Shaws]

My Lords, first, are the Government aware that the greatest advances in the development of law happen in legal aid cases? By diminishing legal aid, you end up undermining law as a whole. Secondly, family law has already suffered cuts, and we are seeing legal aid deserts in certain parts of the country. Women, for example, are not getting the kind of expert help that they need in cases of domestic violence. Thirdly, if the Ministry of Justice is concerned to look at spending on legal matters, has consideration been given to the money paid to lawyers by government, not as legal aid money but money paid by government departments to lawyers at the market rate, which is often excessive? Perhaps we should do something to drive those costs down instead of limiting access to the law by the poor.