Judicial Review and Courts Bill

Debate between Robert Neill and Anne McLaughlin

Report stage
Tuesday 25th January 2022 Commons Chamber

[Sir Robert Neill]

I know we are straying towards the edge of the topic, Madam Deputy Speaker, but I think this is germane, because to make these reforms to the court system work, we have to invest in the professionals who operate in it. I welcome Sir Christopher’s report; it is immensely well researched and immensely well written. The truth is that within the uplift in the Department’s funding, there is scope, I say to the Minister, to implement Bellamy over the period of the spending round. I know that he has had constructive engagement already with Sir Christopher, and I urge him and his colleagues to continue to do so. We should thank Sir Christopher for his work.

I hope, therefore, that we will support the Government amendments. I hope that the Opposition will not press their amendments to a vote, but they raise legitimate issues that the Government should take on board. We all want to co-operate on having a court system that works. Efficiency should not be a matter of partisan debate, because justice must continue to be there, and the more settled arrangements we have across the House, the better confidence will be.

Finally, I express my thanks to magistrates. I have many friends who have served as magistrates. They do a very great public service, but the more magistrates we can get who are younger, the better. We have done pretty well on gender diversity, but we need to do more about recruiting magistrates from ethnic minority communities. That must continue to be a priority. I hope that that will be done by valuing the job; by giving them the resources, and that includes the physical resources and the buildings they sit in, many of which are pretty woeful; by a more imaginative approach to local justice—to where custody cases, for example, are not necessary and to listing cases nearer to people’s homes—by making it easier for witnesses to get to courts, because that was a concern that we raised in our report on access to justice some years ago; and by encouraging the best-quality people to go into the work that is done at the sharp end. That work, actually, is largely in the solicitors’ profession—I say that as a member of the Bar—because they are the people who do the police station call-outs, the early advice and the first appearances in front of magistrates. That is why Sir Christopher’s report, in that regard, is very important.

[Anne McLaughlin]

You will be pleased to know, Madam Deputy Speaker, that most of the SNP’s objections are around judicial review, so I have only two amendments that I want to speak to and I can do that within a couple of minutes to give other people time to speak.

The online procedure rule committee will potentially cover wide areas of law and will sometimes make rules applicable in completely distinct legal jurisdictions. The SNP is concerned about the lack of representation on the committee from Scotland. Amendments 40 and 41 would therefore ensure that someone with knowledge and experience of the Scottish legal system will be appointed to the committee and that appointment should be made by the Lord President of the Court of Session in Scotland. I cannot see any reason to say no to that. That would address the imbalance in the representation of the Scottish legal system and allow the Government to keep up their pretence about respect for Scotland ahead of an independence referendum.

I say to Labour colleagues—I do so gently because the Labour Members present were on the Committee and we very much enjoyed working collaboratively with them—that I was a little disappointed that, with one notable exception, they abstained on amendments that would in effect have allowed Cart judicial reviews, or Eba judicial reviews as we call them, to remain in Scotland. I ask them to consider voting for this simple little measure so that we would have someone with experience and knowledge of the Scottish legal system to represent our system on the committee.

New clause 7 in my name would ensure the Bill’s compatibility with article 6 of the European convention on human rights: the right to a fair trial. To return to the example I gave earlier about the employment tribunal fees judgment in 2017, if the Bill had been in place when that landmark ruling was handed down, no one would have had fees refunded, everyone would have continued to pay the unlawful fees and, going forward, the Government could have simply changed the unlawful so that it was lawful: in other words, there would be no point whatsoever in taking the Government or other public bodies to court. The chilling effect would be widespread. That is surely a breach of article 6, which gives people the right to a fair trial and an effective judicial remedy. The new clause would allow judges a way to disapply the Bill if they considered there was a breach.

Let me give one more example of a group of people who may be refused their rights to a fair trial if the Bill passes: those who require legal aid. To secure legal aid, applicants must be able to demonstrate a tangible benefit if their case is successful. As I and others have demonstrated, if the Bill is enacted, there will regularly be no tangible benefit. If the Government are trying to keep people on average and low incomes away from being able to bring judicial reviews and access justice, they are doing a very effective job, but they should at least be honest about that. They have said and will keep saying that the Bill is compatible with article 6, but surely that begs the question: why do they continue to resist any amendment to ensure compatibility?

United Kingdom Internal Market Bill

Debate between Robert Neill and Anne McLaughlin

Tuesday 22nd September 2020 Commons Chamber

[Anne McLaughlin]

rose—

[Sir Robert Neill]

I am sure the hon. Lady would be disappointed if she did not get every speaker to give way to her at some point, so I will add myself to her set.

[Anne McLaughlin]

If the hon. Gentleman is perfectly happy for our separate legal systems to mean that someone has to be qualified in the given jurisdiction, is he not uncomfortable with the idea that teachers who learn to teach, or who do not get a teaching qualification, in one country can move to another country and teach there? If he is perfectly happy with that, may I talk about—and will he go to the Home Secretary on this—all the teachers I know who have come to this country from other countries across the world, are not allowed to transfer their qualifications and are therefore not allowed to work? If he is happy to provide support on that, I will perhaps think about what he has to say.

[Sir Robert Neill]

The first point is that there have to be professional qualifications in order to recognise the people qualified. The Bill does not seem to cause any difficulty about that. I was also making the point that the carve-out on legal qualifications accepts that there are legitimate areas of difference, but there are many other areas where it is entirely legitimate for us to try to work together as a single UK market. I would have therefore thought that the Bill was balanced and proportionate in that regard. I cited services and the importance of the financial services sector, both north and south of the border, as a key example of that. I hope that after the transition period we will also continue our good links with the financial services sector in Dublin, where a number of English legal and professional firms have bases because of those links. The Bill is not malign in any of those regards.

Although the Bill does not and need not cover this, I hope as we go forward that we will see what can be done to help other parts of the broader British family that would desire access to our new internal market—for example, the Crown dependencies, the Channel Islands and the Isle of Man. Many of their financial sectors— their trust arrangements and their banking fund arrangements—are importantly and closely linked to the City of London and the UK. The Justice Committee has oversight of the Ministry of Justice’s work on the relationships with the Crown dependencies, and I think there is a great desire to see how we can strengthen the access between them and the UK. The aspiration for the Crown dependencies to have free and unfettered access to the UK market is something we should look to explore with them on a reciprocal basis.

That particularly and specifically applies to our British territory of Gibraltar—as you know, Ms McDonagh, I have the honour to be the chair of the all-party parliamentary group on Gibraltar. It is a well expressed intention of the Gibraltar Government, supported by all parties in Gibraltar’s Parliament, to have access to, in effect, a free trade area with the United Kingdom. I hope the Minister will take that back to his colleagues in the Government, because it ought to be a no-brainer as we go forward. It causes the United Kingdom no difficulty, and it would be of considerable reassurance to the people of Gibraltar, who despite having voted overwhelmingly to remain in the European Union, none the less trumped even that and asserted their membership of the British family and the desire to remain with the United Kingdom and not to be coerced, sometimes, by their neighbours. Supporting them by making sure they have full access to the internal market ought to be a high priority, both practically and morally, for the United Kingdom Government.

Finally, there is one area that we can perhaps simplify. I am not generally in favour of simplifying or lowering food standards, and I am certainly not in favour of lowering environmental or food standards as we leave the EU or in any future free trade deal, but there is one area, ironically, where leaving the EU may give us something we can turn to our advantage, and that relates to public procurement and, in particular, local authority procurement.

As a number of hon. Members know, I served in local government for many years before I came into this House, and I was local government Minister for the first half of the coalition. One of the genuine complaints I had from councils of all political complexions was about the complexity of going through the OJEU—Official Journal of the European Union—process, where contracts over a fairly basic level had to be advertised through a pretty bureaucratic process. That had the no doubt laudable objective of ensuring that firms across the single market could access those contracts, although, in practice, doing a contract in Bromley, Merton or wherever was not likely to be attractive to a small-sized firm of builders in Poland or the Czech Republic.