Legal Aid, Sentencing and Punishment of Offenders Bill

Robert Buckland Excerpts

Tuesday 17th April 2012 Commons Chamber

[Mr Clarke]

On the right hon. Gentleman’s first point, I can assure him that we are continuing legal aid in all cases involving judicial review, so legal aid is available to someone who is trying to have a welfare decision judicially reviewed. That applies to every kind of judicial review, because we do not think that the Government or a public body should be resisting a claim about abuse of their powers from a litigant who cannot get legal advice. This is not an easy concession to make, because quite a lot of people who seek judicial review are not instantly popular with all sections of society, but we still give them legal aid.

On the other matter involving situations in which the state is busily arguing against a successful appellant that some kind of law is involved, I will add that to the list of things that we are studying with the DWP to try to identify whether, in cases where the state thinks that it is worth arguing about the interpretation of something, the litigant should be able to do so as well.

[Mr Robert Buckland (South Swindon) (Con)]

I am listening to my right hon. and learned Friend’s arguments with great care, but I am still puzzled about the unavoidable problem of the ability to work out what is a legal issue as opposed to a merely factual one. Fact management and legal issues often come hand in hand, and they are often best handled by a lawyer. I worry that we are making an artificial distinction, and that if, as he is suggesting, we are to rethink a number of issues raised by Members of the House, we should rethink this one too.

[Mr Clarke]

Of course there can be borderline cases, but, with great respect to my hon. Friend, in the vast majority of cases it is fairly obvious whether one is arguing a point of fact or a point of law. In an ordinary welfare case, the question will be whether someone is fit for work or not fit for work, or living or not living at a particular address. When a point of law arises whereby it is not a question of the complexity of the regulations but of the actual meaning of the regulations, somebody like a tribunal judge will know that instantly and think, “That is quite an interesting point of law that I’ve not had before; this will go to the upper tribunal and I will certify that it would be rather nice to have some guidance.” In the end, we have to leave it to tribunals themselves to decide on the facts. Some may be blurred, but by and large, in the vast majority of cases, they will be reasonably clear.

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[Helen Goodman]

Once upon a time the Tory party was the party of liberty, and was particularly energetic in defending the liberties of the individual against the power of the state, but such activity has been completely abandoned this evening, particularly in the Secretary of State’s approach to welfare benefits. It is wholly objectionable for the welfare system to operate without a proper right of redress and recourse unless there is a disagreement about a point of law. That opens the gate to maladministration and low standards, and to a continual lack of proper administration of people’s benefit entitlements.

Not for the first time, the Secretary of State has revealed a perspective that is complacent, out of touch and gender-related. The absence of a woman in the justice team has been highlighted again today. As I have said to the Secretary of State before, I wish that he would telephone the Prime Minister and ask him to replace the hon. Member for Huntingdon (Mr Djanogly) with the hon. Member for Maidstone and The Weald (Mrs Grant), because she would make an excellent Under-Secretary of State. She would do a great job, and above all she would improve the policy. That is what interests us.

I intend to focus on two issues. The first is domestic violence. The hon. Member for Maidstone and The Weald drew attention to the problem of the time limits in the Government’s definition. Taking such a strongly legalistic approach to the evidence base and refusing to accept Lords amendment 194 removes the context of the pattern of domestic abuse. We know that by the time women go to the police they have experienced an average of 35 instances of domestic violence, which is why we want the Bill to provide for a different evidence gateway.

The second issue involves children. I find it incredible that although the Secretary of State expresses concern about child abduction and people seeing their children taken into care and says that in those instances legal aid should be available, when it comes to the needs of the children themselves he is prepared to abandon the 6,000 who will lose their entitlement if the amendment is not retained. It is clear that vulnerable children who are leaving care or estranged from their families may experience significant legal problems involving such complex issues as debt, housing, education, law and benefits. It is impractical to expect young people who already face significant difficulties to bear the additional burden of dealing with the justice system.

It is not clear that what the Government are doing is in accordance with the UN convention on the rights of the child. In another place, Lady Walmsley warned that if children’s access to legal aid is not protected, the Government

“will be taken to the international court. It is as simple as that.” —[Official Report, House of Lords, 16 January 2012; Vol. 734, c. 443.]

I ask Ministers whether they have taken into account the extra costs that will be associated with further appeals to the international courts. We need a proper system that is sensitive to the most needy children in our country.

[Mr Buckland]

I rise to deal with several points raised during consideration of this group of amendments. First, I welcome the Government’s sensible concessions in respect of domestic violence. The Secretary of State and his colleagues will know that when these matters were last before this House I expressed concerns about the role of undertakings in proceedings. I was concerned that undertakings would not be part of any process of assessment for legal aid. I am glad that the Government have accepted the concern expressed by me and others on that, and have accepted a range of other sources of evidence, including, most notably, that from women’s refuges and medical reports. I accept the Government’s argument that it would be better to incorporate that list of criteria in regulations, rather than in primary legislation. Experience shows that regulations can be more quickly amended if obvious problems and abuses occur in the system. It would be a tragedy if, through delays in legislative procedure, people in genuine need went without legal aid. For that reason, I am able to support the Government’s approach in the context of domestic violence.

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[Mr Buckland]

The hon. Lady is right, in that we already have huge deserts in our legal aid provision. The previous Government ran down the legal aid bill substantially. I am sorry to say that a lot of the arguments about the provision of legal aid that we have heard in this place have been rather synthetic, particularly those put by hon. Members on the Opposition Front Bench. Taking the moral high ground is a particularly dangerous position for the Opposition, given the reduction of legal aid provision over the past 10 to 15 years or more.

I return to the point about the provision of legal aid for social welfare. I remain concerned that, far too often, poor decision making on the part of the Department for Work and Pensions is leading to a rise in the number of appeals. We know that that number is rising exponentially and that it is projected to increase considerably over the next few years. I make no apology for the Government’s wise reforms on welfare benefits, but the fact is that wrong decisions will be made and they will need to be challenged and properly dealt with. That is why I am concerned that, despite the Government’s proper concessions on points of law, we are still not in a place where we need to be. Although we have welcome Cabinet Office funding, which is now year on year—another of my pleas has been listened to—right up to the end of the Parliament, we need to understand whether that will be enough to fill what I see as a gap in provision. I am not making a plea on behalf of particular organisations, although I strongly support the Law Centres Federation and my local Wiltshire law centre; this is a plea on behalf of the people who will rightly have points to raise, which will be mixed points of law and fact.

I know that other hon. Members wish to speak in the debate before the knife falls, but I shall briefly discuss clinical negligence. I have long taken the view that matters of clinical negligence should remain within the scope of legal aid. I accept that there are constraints on Government finances, but this is one of those areas where assistance still needs to be provided for challenges to decisions and errors made by the state or its representatives—I strongly believe that that needs to be an underlying philosophy in rebalancing how we spend our legal aid budget. Clinical negligence falls clearly into that bracket. Neither of the proposed amendments in this area does the job as effectively as I would like, but I am sad to say that nor does the Government’s current amendment. I can see problems in arguments about whether the child will have reached eight weeks after birth and what the date of expected birth would be; there will be arguments about how children and babies will fit into the criteria. If we are saying that they are in the exceptional cases category in any case, the Government’s amendment does not add up to very much. I say that with respect to my colleagues. So there are still questions to be answered on two particular areas about which I have concerns. With those observations, I will allow others to enter the debate.

[Yvonne Fovargue]

I wish to support the hon. Member for South Swindon (Mr Buckland) and remind the House that there is a high level of decision-making error. In a recent Westminster Hall debate, we were told that the delay in tribunals is more than one year because of the number of people who—let us remember this—have been unlawfully denied benefit. They have been unlawfully denied their rights. When people go to a tribunal and are represented, they are 78% more likely to win. This is not just about the representation; it is about the preparation of written statements, for which they can receive legal help. They do not receive any legal help for representation, but legal help is provided for a written statement, which will help them go themselves to the tribunal. May I remind the Secretary of State that these written statements and the representation, in the main, are not provided by lawyers or generalist advisers, and they are certainly not provided by MPs? I find it really insulting to the dedicated and knowledgeable band of specialists with whom I have worked over the years for him to say, “Anyone can do this. We MPs will do it for them because we can do it better.” That is simply not the case.

I also wish to discuss the fact that many of the cases do not involve legal help. I can assure Government Members that, having been audited many times by the Legal Services Commission, I know that it does not pay its money out willy-nilly—even the £164 that is obtained for a legal aid case. If it felt that something did not fall within the scope of legal help, someone would not get the money for that case—indeed, it would possibly deduct from even more cases. It is really important to get the facts and the right sort of evidence for a tribunal, which is where specialists are important. Unfortunately, although I welcome the second tier being brought back into scope, it cannot look again at any evidence; it can look only at the point of law. So the fact that someone has not presented the right evidence and that the right facts have not been looked at cannot be considered any further.

Early advice saves money. Early advice is so important in all aspects of law in order to keep people out of the courts system, as the Secretary of State said. This measure is like telling somebody who has a chest infection, “When you get to the stage of intensive care, we will deal with you,” when a cheap course of antibiotics could help them in the first place.

The cost of reviews and appeals is 66% of the legal aid budget, or £16.5 million. That amount of money would bring these cases back into scope and it would save the country money that would otherwise go on complicated cases and on people falling on to the state in the long run. Every such case on welfare benefits saves the state £8.80 in other costs; it saves time and it saves money. To take these cases out of scope and simply leave a second-tier tribunal in scope is a false economy. It will not help the people who come to our surgeries and it will not help the people who are looking for advice from a citizens advice bureau, because, as has been said many times, the required number of specialists may not be in place. The cases left in scope will not be viable for many of the advice agencies.

I believe that keeping amendment 168 and providing help in lower-tier tribunals will in the end save money and, more importantly, will save misery for a lot of people who have been unlawfully denied benefits by the state.