Legal Aid (Rural Wales)

Roger Williams Excerpts

Wednesday 26th June 2013 Westminster Hall

[Mr Williams]

The hon. Lady pre-empts another of my later remarks. The relationship between solicitors and those repeat offenders is critical, and we risk losing that.

It is asserted that there would be four providers across the whole of Dyfed Powys. There would be real access issues, and are the proposed consortia feasible? As we have heard from hon. Members, the proposals plan to have four providers across the whole of Dyfed Powys, four across the whole of north Wales—sorry, I correct myself—and four in Gwent and nine across the whole of south Wales. By contrast, 37 contracts are planned for Greater Manchester, which has a similar population to south Wales. Again, will the Ministry of Justice, and the Whip speaking for the Ministry today, outline how that was calculated? How was rurality factored in? Although my hon. Friends from south Wales and the M4 corridor will have strong feelings about the provision of access there, for those of us who work, live and function in mid-Wales and north Wales, the picture is disastrous. We lose out yet again, and we are put at a real disadvantage compared with other people across the country.

My next concern is that competitive tendering at 17.5% less will drive solicitors out of business. The competitive tendering proposed for contracts remains a major cause for concern. It will simply drive solicitors out of business. Those remaining will be firms that are willing to cut costs, possibly to unworkable levels. That would lead to tenders being awarded to less able and potentially less experienced firms, which may find themselves unable to deliver on the prices promised to secure the tender. I am clear in my mind where I would like to go if I needed legal advice. However, there is the spectacle of Eddie Stobart or Tesco providing the service. The Co-op has been mentioned recently, and I am a great supporter of the Co-op. It is an admirable place to go to buy food and it has a fine record of burying people—the Co-op funeral service is very good—but we should not be using such examples to justify changes to the legal system.

I am greatly concerned about the capacity of companies such as Capita, GEOAmey, Serco and G4S—and whether they are best placed to represent my constituents. My colleague in another place, Lord Thomas of Gresford alerted us in a Queen’s Speech contribution to Stobart Barristers—an offshoot of Eddie Stobart trucks. Lord Thomas noted that the Stobart Barristers legal director, Trevor Howarth, had confirmed that the firm would bid for the new criminal defence contracts and had 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”.

As my noble Friend concluded, the problem with that is that criminal law is not a unit and justice is not a product that can be delivered like a load of bricks. That is the contrast in terms of what we are facing. There is a real fear that many of our high street solicitors will be lost; many will go out of business. The firms with the most cut-throat prices and cut-throat tactics will be the most successful, but I believe that liberty should be in the hands of the best, not the cheapest.

I come now to the loss of specialisms.

[Roger Williams (Brecon and Radnorshire) (LD)]

My hon. Friend is making many very good points, but surely one of them is that the people who supply these legal services will be given a financial incentive to get their clients to plead guilty. Surely, that is a characteristic of a totalitarian state, not the liberal democracy to which we aspire.

[Mr Williams]

My hon. Friend and I agree. He uses a very emotive word to describe what I think will be the reality on the ground.

Under the proposals, a call centre will allocate a lawyer from any background—an impersonal experience in itself—who might provide a minimal service to meet the requirements of the contract. People will not be able to select a firm by reputation, by personal recommendation or, sadly, by past experience. That discourages good practice and good performance among professionals, as those who gain a contract will get clients regardless of performance. Therefore, clients will be unable to choose a firm according to the nature—sometimes, the specialised nature—of their case. I have said this before and it is worth repeating: let us not understate the importance of the relationship between solicitors and clients and the trust that has been built up.

Solicitors in my constituency are concerned that the consultation document encourages solicitors not to provide a good service—not to provide the best service. The aim is to be “above acceptable levels”. That is a worrying prospect.

There will be a lack of choice. Owing to the call centre allocation of solicitors, clients will be left with no choice of representation. They may have a lawyer who does not know them or the area in which they live and who certainly does not know the background to their case. As the hon. Member for Llanelli (Nia Griffith) said, a different company could represent them at different stages. I think that that is bad.

The consultation document suggests that the same fee will be paid—this is the point made by my hon. Friend the Member for Brecon and Radnorshire (Roger Williams)—whether or not the matter is contested. Those firms that are awarded contracts will have a financial incentive to do minimal work to make their business sustainable, to the detriment of the client’s case. That could lead to a perverse incentive for legal advisers to recommend that clients plead guilty, as they would receive the same fee regardless of plea—a conclusion that certainly the solicitors whom I have spoken to are concerned about. They believe that suspicion may be created between client and lawyer.

I want to end where I started, with the effects on language. When we are talking about the consultation, there remain serious issues surrounding the provision of language services. I have anecdotal evidence that the large firm Capita is regularly unable to provide interpreting services to courts in a timely manner. In my constituency, as I said, Welsh is the first language of about half the population. In many parts of Ceredigion, it is overwhelmingly the language of everyday use, so the issue to which I refer is a worry and a barrier preventing many people from accessing the representation to which they are entitled.

I want to ask the Minister and particularly those behind the scenes in the Ministry of Justice about their awareness of Wales and of the Welsh language. As the Welsh Government pointed out in their submission to the consultation, the Ministry of Justice’s own Welsh language scheme—a point that the right hon. Member for Dwyfor Meirionnydd (Mr Llwyd) mentioned—declares the Ministry’s commitment to the principle of treating the English and Welsh languages on the basis of equality. The current system of more local provision means that someone is more likely to satisfy Welsh language needs. These proposals mean that it is much more likely that a provider will be based outside the relevant area and even outside Wales, allowing no provision for Welsh language services at all.

The proposals are socially divisive, as only the wealthy will be able to afford to choose their own lawyer. Only those who can afford to will be able to determine how they are represented. Everyone else, if they are eligible for legal aid, will be allocated a lawyer via a call centre.

Some of the public narrative on the issue has characterised it as one of fat cat lawyers acting in their own interests, although if we talk to solicitors on the ground, the story is somewhat different. In reality, it is far more worrying. It is about universal access to justice, the credibility of our court and justice system and the responsibility of Parliament to ensure the continued efficacy of our justice system.

Overall, what has been billed as a simple money-saving measure will have far deeper ramifications for society. The proposals take the fundamental principle of access to justice away from anyone who cannot afford it, but it is a right, not a commodity to be bought and sold.

The Minister knows that this is a consultation, and the deliberations will go on about the various submissions. I sincerely hope that it is a real consultation and that the Government will look at the submissions, particularly those from us in Wales and the concerns that we have raised; and I hope that the Minister and the Ministry of Justice will therefore reflect favourably on the needs of rural Wales.