Queen’s Speech

Lord Thomas of Gresford Excerpts

Thursday 9th May 2013 Lords Chamber

[Lord Thomas of Gresford]

My Lords, I am not a dog but I do not think that introducing identity cards is going to solve the problems that the noble Lord has just outlined. I am sorry to hear voices raised in favour of identity cards—we thought the Labour Party had lost its desire to control which it exhibited during 13 years in government.

Turning to something quite different, I very much regret that there is nothing in the gracious Speech that would permit parliamentary scrutiny of proposals which seem to be designed to destroy access to justice in criminal cases. The Ministry of Justice’s current consultation is for a scheme of “competitive tendering” for criminal legal aid, which will not require primary legislation.

The consultation is a sham, as Ministers have already decided that they are in favour of such a scheme in principle and, regardless of the consultation, competitive tendering will be introduced within months. The only question posed in the consultation is the precise model. The model proposed by the Government could have been brought forward only by Ministers and their advisers, who have not the slightest experience of the way criminal courts operate or of the professional values, ethics and practices of the legal profession.

The key parts of the consultation document are chapter 4, on introducing competition in the criminal legal aid market, and chapter 5, on reforming fees in criminal legal aid. Chapter 4 is about introducing price-competitive tendering. Those proposals will be the death of the high street solicitor. The intention is to remove competition on quality and replace it with competition on price alone. In each of the contract areas, which will match the 41 police areas, there will be a set number of contracts. In my own immediate vicinity, there will be four in north Wales, four in Cheshire and some 37 in Manchester. Contracts will be awarded on a three-year basis. Successful bidders will receive a guaranteed equal share of the criminal work in that area. To achieve equality, work will be allocated by a central agency on neutral criteria; for example, by surname alone. The explicit intention is therefore to abolish client choice. A solicitor will be appointed by a central agency to act for a defendant. The reputation and good will which solicitors have built up within their area disappear. The skills of firms which have built up particular specialisms—for example, in fraud, terrorism or mentally disordered offenders—will count for nothing. In cities such as Manchester, the skills of firms which have a client base within particular ethnic communities or with particular language skills—for example, Urdu or Polish—are of no value because work is to be allocated on random criteria. As for my home territory, Welsh language provision is seriously compromised.

The contracts will be one size fits all. There is a Goldilocks problem about this: most firms are too small to bid at all and, ironically, many others are too big to bid. In Manchester there are a couple of firms which have 10% to 15% of the market but which under the new system of equality would be restricted to one-37th of the market, or 2.7%. There may be a handful of firms, or networks of firms, which are just the right size to bid. However, these contracts will go mostly to service companies which have the capital to create a national network with contracts in every area; for example, G4S, Serco, Tesco and the Co-op. Perhaps the most aggressive is the newly arrived Stobart Barristers, an offshoot of Eddie Stobart truckers. Its legal director, Trevor Howarth, confirmed that the firm would bid for the new criminal defence contracts. He said:

“We can deliver the service at a cost that’s palatable for the taxpayer … Our business model was developed with this in mind. We at Stobart are well known for taking out the waste and the waste here is the duplication of solicitors going to the courtroom. At the moment there are 1,600 legal aid firms; in future there will be 400. At Stobart, we wouldn’t use 10 trucks to deliver one product”.

I think that, like the Ministry of Justice, he regards people in trouble with the criminal law as units and justice as a common product to be delivered like a load of bricks. Mr Howarth is, I believe, currently on trial himself for contempt of court for allegedly lying in court. I say no more about it.

From a business perspective, however, the changes do not make sense. The companies which win the contracts will be monolithic, national firms. The government agenda generally is supposed to be to support SMEs—small and medium enterprises—but the effect of these proposals will be to send the existing providers, the high street firms, to the wall. There will be mass bankruptcies and redundancies. The new providers, the big companies, will bid low to start with, but once they have destroyed the competition from existing solicitors, inevitably prices will rise, with the profits going to the big boys.

If the Government’s proposed model is adopted, quality is to be driven down to minimum standards. The single determining factor for success will be price. Practitioners will be valued and rewarded for producing the highest turnover of work at the lowest cost. Literally and intentionally, no value will be attached to quality of representation. If the professions are dumbed down, it will impact ultimately on the judiciary. Someone has already said that, if you have Tesco-grade lawyers, within 10 years you will have to start appointing Tesco-grade judges because they will be the only people to have experience in this field.

The complaint about the chapter 4 proposals is that they represent the intentional dumbing-down of the criminal justice system. Quite explicitly, the intention is to reduce the quality of representation to a set of minimum standards. No value will be attached to quality of representation. The explicit abolition of client choice will erode confidence in the system.

The proposals in chapter 5 are about the reform of fee structures. There is opposition to the reduction in fees, which are cutting to levels which are unsustainable, but that is not the main thrust of opposition. The concern is that the new structures are unworkable, the most obvious being the proposals to cut trial fees. In many cases, the advocate will be paid the same for a guilty plea as he or she would get for a trial. In more complex cases, refreshers would be paid on a reducing scale so that, in some cases, they might fall to £14 a day, without expenses.

The intention is presumably to add to the incentives to defendants to plead guilty. The effect of that is to create conflicts of interest between the advocate and his/her client. The advocate is punished financially if the client pleads not guilty and goes to trial. Not only is that wrong in principle, it is counterproductive: if defendants know that the advocate has a conflicting financial incentive, they will not listen to him when he tells them to plead guilty, because it will be in his financial interest to do precisely that. Hence, there will be more trials, at greater expense.

The proposals will mean fundamental changes, but there is to be no pilot scheme. One of the most dangerous aspects of the price competitive tendering proposal is the compete lack of modelling or trialling. The Attorney-General, Dominic Grieve QC, gave the explicit assurance before the general election that the Tories would not introduce tendering without full trials first. Why has the one person in this Government with practical experience been overruled?

The proposals are to be brought in nationwide, commencing this autumn, without any trial period. They will be irreversible, because once the existing providers have gone, they will never come back. It was made clear in Tuesday’s Law Society Gazette that most of the significant current providers regard the scheme as unworkable and will not tender.

On the subject of minimum quality standards, there is a link to a separate set of proposals to introduce a quality assurance scheme for advocates. I will not go into that at this stage. Suffice it to say that solicitor advocates can presently obtain higher level grades on the basis of attending a course and giving a good performance in role-play exercises. They are not judged on their actual performance in real cases at a lower level.

I am a former solicitor, so I have no axe to grind, but a very experienced Crown Court judge, who was also a solicitor, told me recently that the quality of advocacy in the Crown Court is, unhappily, appalling. He faces the dilemma that if he, as the judge, steps in to the arena too often to correct a solicitor advocate who is making a hash of the case before him, it quickly gives the appearance of bias. He was also concerned that in very serious cases, where two advocates are required to represent an accused, the fees structure is such that solicitor advocates now frequently seize the role of junior to themselves. However, he told me, if the lead counsel has to be elsewhere—for example in the Court of Appeal—far from the junior taking over, as has been the tradition at the Bar for ever, the solicitor advocate immediately applies for an adjournment. He can not carry the weight or responsibility of the hands-on conduct of the case. That judge told me that he was in despair.

I have to say that no one with experience of the criminal courts could ever advise a young person starting his career to take up the role of a criminal advocate. Centuries of experience have created the system in which a team of solicitor and counsel work to high ethical standards to ensure that justice is done. I shall be sad if liberals of any political party or none in this House assist in its destruction.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Phillips of Sudbury]

Plymouth. I thank my noble friend Lord Smith very much for that vital piece of accuracy. I rather get the impression that the turnout throughout the country was hovering at around 30%, on average. If you consider that among voters aged under 30, of whom fewer than one in four turned out at the previous general election, possibly only one in 10 cast their votes last week. I do not think that anyone sitting here believes that we are in our prime as a democracy or a Parliament.

We should never forget that the expenses scandal is not a thing of the past. I did a bit of canvassing this time; and the expenses scandal has marked the mind of the British public much more deeply than we would wish, I fear. We all know well about the Leveson inquiry and what it showed in terms of the press, the police and so on. All in all, we are in a dangerous phase, particularly given the continuing crisis in the financial and banking sectors.

A significant element in this disillusion relates to the astonishing amount of complex law that we churn out from this place, year after year. It may also surprise your Lordships that our Library does not stock a complete set of statutes from this side of 2009. You cannot even obtain loose-leafed copies of statutory instruments from 2010, for example. However, those from 2009 are available. In that year, this place produced in excess of 16,000 pages of new statute law; the split was roughly one-quarter Acts of Parliament and three-quarters statutory instruments.

There are a number of lawyers here; all of us, I suppose, are lawyers of a sort because we legislate this stuff. However, we know very well how extraordinarily complex legislation has become because of the extent to which any new law has to fit into existing law. The situation becomes overwhelming, and I have noticed that in the course of our deliberations on Bills there has been a marked reduction in the number of Peers who sit here trying to grapple with amendments that tax the wisdom of Jove.

For example, since 1984, we have passed more than 100 criminal justice Acts of one sort or another and have brought into existence more than 4,000 criminal offences. I suspect that that represents rather more than were created in the whole of our previous history. EU law finds reference in 10% of our legislation, and on top of that we gold-plate EU legislation to an astonishing extent. These are not my statistics; they come from the fine document by the parliamentary draftsmen to which I referred. They provide an example of directive 2002/42, which consisted of 1,167 words in the English text issued from Brussels. By the time we had ploughed it into our own legislation, it had gone from 1,167 to 27,000 words. What is it about this Chamber, using God’s own language, English, that we manage to produce this—I am tempted to use a very rude word—excess of legislation? So far as the people of this country are concerned, it is oppressive, distancing, expensive, disillusioning, disengaging, centralising and dependency-making—you name it.

[Lord Thomas of Gresford]

Incomprehensible.

[Lord Phillips of Sudbury]

Incomprehensible, as my noble friend says—to lawyers, inter alia. There are a number of senior judges sitting here and I am sure that they would be able to relate wonderful tales about the stuff that has come before them. I heard from one justice of the Supreme Court the other day that they were about to give judgment when one of them suddenly thought, “Hey, wasn’t something passed in 1995?”. When they went back to look, sure enough there was, and they rewrote their judgment. I shall not name names.

The truth is that this state of affairs is brought about by a combination of circumstances, one important aspect of which the noble Lord, Lord Cormack, recently referred to—the production-line legislation in the other place and the guillotining Motions that render much of the legislation there not merely inadequately considered but not considered at all. Large chunks of legislation come here never having been debated. Added to that, there is the manifesto theory of government—that if it is in your manifesto, you are entitled to legislate for it. The fact that nobody reads or buys the manifesto is neither here nor there. In the 1945 election, the manifesto for the Attlee Government was, I think, 15 pages long, whereas for the current Government it is 115 pages, but that is apparently of no importance.

Incidentally, the Queen’s Speech talks about bringing in 15 new statutes, and I believe that we have five carry-over Bills. I hope that under the health and safety legislation, which we are going to simplify, we will be allowed to have back the brushes in our gentlemen’s toilets. Noble Lords may not have noticed but they have been withdrawn on health and safety grounds. Therefore, one major improvement will be coming our way, God willing.

As I said, all this creates confusion in the minds of the public because we are endlessly changing things. We are not content to leave a law in place for 10 or 20 years. A new Minister in a new Administration says, “I’d like a new Education Act”, or whatever it might be. The poor old public are punch drunk. I repeat that there is a degree of resentment at what, too often, are seen as impositions by us. What is more, they are careless and unnecessary impositions. One sometimes has the feeling that some of this legislation is trophy stuff that Ministers can paste to their lavatory walls back home.

[Lord Thomas of Gresford]

Or use it.

[Lord Phillips of Sudbury]

Indeed, or use it. There is a serious issue of demoralisation in a literal sense—de-moralisation. The more law you have, the more you take from the citizens of the state, in whatever situation, the need to reach their own decisions or to think through the consequences of acting in this way or that. In effect, you provide a rule that all must abide by, and too often the statutory rule is the rule. As I said, it discourages businesses, societies and organisations from taking responsibility for their own affairs, and all that has had an indirect impact on the public service ethos. I do not think it is at all contentious to remark that in this age community life is under severe attack. There is a real dilution of the strength of communities throughout our land, and those communities are the building blocks of a good society—I do not think that anybody disputes that. Consider today how few of what one might call the natural elite are engaged in their communities. My own profession which used to be the classic pillar of local communities is today far less engaged in community life than it has ever been—to the great loss of community life and lawyers as a group because there is huge fulfilment and respect to be gained. It is not just lawyers, but everyone. This is a deep matter.

I shall finalise by quoting from When Laws Become Too Complex. Its conclusion is headed:

“Conclusions and a Vision for Good Law … Mitigating causes of complex legislation”.

It states that,

“there needs to be a shared ownership of, and pride in, our legislation”.

How I agree. Consultation today is too often superficial, if not insincere. Too often Governments of all persuasions make their minds up and at the last toss of the dice say, “We’ll consult”. They do and vast numbers of people reply, but nothing changes and the legislation goes on. We have consulted ha, ha. The conclusion continues:

“There also needs to be a stronger incentive on all involved in the process to avoid generating excessively complex law, or to act positively to promote accessibility, ease of navigation, and simplification”.

That is from the parliamentary draftsmen who too often are blamed in this House and the other place for the state of our Bills when more often than not it is our fault, not theirs. Despite those unanswerable recommendations by the draftsmen, we need to look much more at implementation and enforcement of the laws that we have. It seems to me that we legislate because we have not implemented what is already there, or implemented it fairly, effectively or comprehensively.

Education in citizenship is not a voluntary or optional extra in our schools. If we have created a society of such barbaric complexity that very often we ourselves cannot understand quite where things are, how can we expect ordinary, decent young kids to feel part of this enterprise, to feel ownership of it or to feel responsible for it, if we do not equip them with the basic amount of information, knowledge and understanding to grapple with it and develop a will to be citizens? It is not just a name. I hope that in our deliberations over the next few years we will try always to think how Bills will impact on the good, ordinary citizens of this country and how we can improve.

Lastly, I must say a word about enforcement on legal aid. I shall not labour the point as my noble friend Lord McNally has had enough of it. He and the Government have said that they are committed to looking carefully at the impact of the legal aid changes that we have made. I think that after a year there is a commitment to look at sensitive aspects, and I hope that we will do that. To have all this law, which is not voluntary or optional, and then not provide citizens in most need with legal help, and without which the rights we legislate for them are cynical, is the worst of all worlds.