Future of Legal Aid

Debate between Robert Neill and Karen Buck

Thursday 1st November 2018 Westminster Hall

[Ms Karen Buck (Westminster North) (Lab)]

It is a great pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Sir Henry, particularly given your personal interest in and commitment to this field of policy. It is also a great pleasure to follow two superb speeches that set out the broad range of topics that we need to cover. I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Hammersmith (Andy Slaughter) on securing the debate and on his opening speech. I strongly commend the speech of the Chair of the Justice Committee, the hon. Member for Bromley and Chislehurst (Robert Neill); I do not think I disagreed with a word of it.

The excellent briefings that we received in advance of the debate from a wide range of organisations come on top of a wealth of analysis that has already contributed to the debate, not only from the Justice Committee but from my own Committee, the Joint Committee on Human Rights, which produced a report including an analysis of many of the post-LASPO failings. The case has already been made, as we have heard today, but I wish to make a few remarks to convey not just an analytical concern for the post-LASPO world, but the real anxiety, passion and anger that so many people feel about the environment in which we find ourselves.

Yesterday morning, we marked Justice Week with a meeting of the all-party parliamentary group on legal aid. We were very pleased that the Minister came to speak to us and that the meeting was very well attended, including by the Bar Council, the Law Society, parliamentarians, a great many people from the not-for-profit sector, and solicitors. We heard a compelling case for the central role of legal aid and for ensuring access to justice. We heard the message that the Government need to hear thunder reverberating, because every single prediction made before the passage of LASPO has come to pass. We heard that the situation has declined to the point that the criminal Bar has thought it necessary to take strike action and the Law Society is taking legal action against the Government. It is unprecedented in modern times for those organisations to feel compelled to take such strong action, but they want the Government to hear exactly what is going on.

Sadly, in Justice Week, we also learned in the Budget that the Ministry of Justice, which with the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government has already taken the largest cuts of any Department, is to be subject to yet another cut. It is an unprotected Department, and we now know that its budget will be cut from £6.3 billion to £6 billion. We are making the case for legal aid in a context in which justice funding is falling still further.

As we have heard, legal aid is in competition with many other areas of justice that are also under intolerable pressure. Almost every hon. Member in this Chamber has been present at debates that conveyed our anxiety about other creaking, breaking parts of the criminal justice system, so it is understandable that we are extremely concerned to ensure that the case for legal aid is not made at the expense of the prison service or the other parts of the justice system that are also under absolutely intolerable strain. In truth, the thunder is reverberating; it is just that the Government have not been listening.

I will not repeat in great detail the case that has been made so widely in this House and through the many forms of evidence submitted to the LASPO review about the consequences of areas of service falling out of scope and of the tightening of eligibility. The impact on providers has in turn had an impact on people—often the most vulnerable people—who need to be effectively represented.

[Robert Neill]

I agree entirely with the hon. Lady’s argument, and I am glad that she referred to Justice Week. Does she agree that it might be worth while for every Member of this House to watch the Bar Council’s video about justice cuts, in which several providers, as well as hon. Members, talk about the impact on the individual cases they deal with?

[Ms Buck]

Absolutely. I would love every Member of this House to watch that video and to be made aware of the case being made.

We know what is happening to legal aid providers. Law centres lost 60% of their income from legal aid post LASPO, and in the immediate aftermath we lost eleven law centres. I pay tribute to my own centre, Paddington law centre, which provides such an essential service. I also commend North Kensington law centre—this country’s first law centre, which I used to represent but is now just outside my constituency—for doing such extraordinary work in the aftermath of Grenfell.

Law centres are indispensable; they are an integral part of effective community life. The Chair of the Justice Committee was absolutely right to draw attention to the fact that justice is not a private transaction. These services—particularly law centres, but not only them—are part of a healthy community and a strong civic life. The consequences of undermining them go far beyond the individuals concerned.

Prison Reform and Safety

Debate between Robert Neill and Karen Buck

Thursday 7th December 2017 Commons Chamber

[Robert Neill]

My hon. Friend clearly remembers it vividly.

The point was well made. There are some people whom we will always have to imprison, because they deserve to go to prison, and I saw enough of them during my career as a barrister practising criminal law. However, many others are in prison due to far more complex reasons, such as bad choices, lack of support, lack of background, poor education and mental health issues. We need to be much more discerning, and that means that we need a much more sophisticated approach to our penal policy. We need to introduce genuinely robust alternatives to custody, in the right cases, for those who do not pose a threat and a danger to the public, and who can be reformed without their going to prison. That is critical. We have not yet achieved that. The objective must be not only that the public have confidence in sentences, but that we have proper systems for the rehabilitation of those who are incarcerated. However, as almost everyone will be released at some point, we must make sure we release them in a better state in which they can contribute to society than at present.

[Ms Karen Buck (Westminster North) (Lab)]

The hon. Gentleman rightly emphasises the importance of education and rehabilitation, but may I add to that the critical aspect of access to family? May I also commend to him the report on mental health in prisons by the Joint Committee on Human Rights, and the work that we did in particular to look at the risks to young people and offenders with mental health problems? Such people were not always guaranteed access to family support at critical times when they were self-harming or at risk of suicide?

[Robert Neill]

That is a good point. I know that other Members are likely to take up such issues in our debate.

While we welcome a number of the initiatives the Government have implemented, more still needs to be done. We particularly regret the loss of the prison element of the Prisons and Courts Bill from the last Parliament, because implementing that statutory purpose, which would have covered rehabilitation for prisoners, would have been an important umbrella under which to link the good work that is done. It is good news that we have a proper prison reform and safety plan, but it needs to be put into a full context. We need positive actions, not just the good aspirations that are set out.

It is essential that there is a genuinely independent and robust inspectorate, so it is regrettable that we have so far lost the opportunity to place on a statutory basis not just the chief inspector of prisons, but the whole inspectorate as an institution, and to strengthen the requirement for his recommendations to be complied with. It is scandalous that at present only a minority of his recommendations in some cases are taken up. That needs to change. It is also regrettable that the prisons and probation ombudsman has not yet been placed on a statutory basis. I hope we will find a legislative opportunity to do so. I believe that that is what the Minister wants to do, but we must not lose it from the agenda.

Our present indicators on safety in relation to self-harm, suicides, prisoner-on-prisoner assaults and assaults on staff continue to go in the wrong direction. More prison officers have been put in, but we must look in the round, too, at how many people we are sending to prison and why, and what sort of regimes are in place.

We have heard reference to an action plan on prison safety and reform, and what we hope to see are specific strategies on employment, mental health, women in prison, and the retention and recruitment of officers, because keeping experienced officers is particularly important. We need a proper robust inspection mechanism under which the inspectorate, which includes excellent people, has genuine teeth to do what is necessary. We also need more transparency, and I know that my hon. Friend the Member for Banbury (Victoria Prentis) will talk about transparency and data.

It is not acceptable that of the 29 local prisons and training prisons inspected this year, 21 were judged to be poor or not sufficiently good. I know that the Minister agrees that we have to turn that around, but all too often I have found a culture of defensiveness among some of the senior management in Her Majesty’s Prison and Probation Service. We must use the changes that have been made to the structure of the service to refresh that culture at every level. That is a most pressing matter. Great work is done further down, but all too often prison officers and governors have said to us that they feel cut out from what can still be too hierarchical a chain of command. That needs to change.

Prison reform was rightly described by David Cameron as a “great progressive cause”, and so it should be, for politicians on both sides of the political divide. Let me end with this thought. A former Home Secretary who became Prime Minister said that one of the purposes of prison was to seek the treasure in the heart of every man. That was said by Winston Churchill in 1910. I say to the current Prime Minister that, as she has had the same career trajectory, such a phrase would fit very well with her desire to tackle burning injustices in society. Some of the injustices and challenges are as acute in our prisons as anywhere else. This is a great cause, and we hope that we will have some more specific responses from the Minister to our reports, and a further indication of the direction of travel. Above all, I hope the House will not let this issue slide down the agenda.