Transforming Legal Aid

Sadiq Khan Excerpts

Thursday 5th September 2013 Commons Chamber

[Sadiq Khan (Tooting) (Lab)]

I shall start by thanking the current Lord Chancellor for giving me advance sight of his oral statement just over an hour ago. However, I am still somewhat puzzled as to why today’s edition of The Times was considered a more important outlet for the public announcement of this climbdown than the proper place for such an announcement, which is here in Parliament. Can the media-shy Lord Chancellor explain that rather odd decision to the House?

Let me reiterate Labour’s position. We support efforts to find savings across our criminal justice system. We support making those who can afford to pay their legal fees to do so and restricting legal aid to those truly most in need. We also support using the frozen assets of criminals to fund their legal costs, and we want a more efficient system. We offered months ago to work with the Justice Secretary, but he arrogantly refused, although I note that he has taken on board many of our concerns, which we welcome, and adopted our idea of having a review and asking experts to look at the legal processes to see whether further positive reforms can be made. Will he please give the House more details of this review?

Today’s statement provides confirmation that the Justice Secretary’s plans—and they were his plans—really were half-baked, legally illiterate nonsense. He has been forced to climb down, and the sloppy way in which he goes about making policy has been exposed by experts in the field—from judges to rape victims, and from high street solicitors to the victims of miscarriages of justice, who really know what they are talking about.

This Justice Secretary was warned—by us and others—that his plans would see the destruction of a swathe of legal small and medium-sized enterprises across the country, yet he denied that it would happen. He was warned that the removal of client choice would undermine confidence in our legal system; he denied it. He was warned that a flat fee would put pressure on the innocent to plead guilty; he refused to accept that, either. Does he now agree with all those criticisms of his original proposals?

This is the first time that the Justice Secretary has participated on a debate in this Chamber on legal aid, so I have a number of further questions for him. Will he confirm that the 16,000 representations that the Ministry of Justice received about his plans is a record? I note, of course, that the Justice Secretary has made a deal with the trade union for solicitors, the Law Society, which we welcome. Does the Law Society fully accept the plans he has published today? Does he still stand by his previous public criticism of the barristers’ trade union, the Bar Council? What discussions has he had with it about these plans? Will he confirm that his latest plans still lead to a single fee for magistrates courts’ work, regardless of whether the case is a guilty plea or a trial? The right hon. Gentleman will be aware that this could lead to a perverse incentive to persuade a defendant to plead guilty when he or she is not guilty. Given that the Government have changed their mind on this issue for Crown courts, why not for magistrates courts, too?

The Justice Secretary will be aware that small and medium-sized firms undertaking legal aid work are already struggling to survive. There is a real concern about their future viability after a 17.5% cut in their fees. In that light, will the right hon. Gentleman tell us about the impact assessments he has done on his latest plans? What will be their impact on high street firms, on junior barristers, on black, Asian and minority ethnic solicitors and barristers, and on access to solicitors across the country, particularly in rural areas?

Will the right hon. Gentleman tell us what changes he has made to his plans for civil legal aid and judicial review, bearing in mind the many concerns raised across the House about them? He should now be aware that his plans for civil legal aid would have prevented the Gurkhas and the family of Jean Charles de Menezes from getting legal aid, while his plans for judicial review would create a perverse incentive for lawyers not to settle cases because they will need to get permission at a court hearing to recover costs. How is he going to address those concerns?

I am pleased that the Justice Secretary used his summer to swot up on the law and the justice system. I am glad that the primer worked. I am pleased that he appears finally to have seen sense and to have listened to those who know better. We will study the new plans closely, and consider the 270-page document published by him today. The public want confidence that the rule of law is being preserved, that access to justice is being maintained and that those truly guilty are being prosecuted and punished after due process. The justice system needs to be both credible and efficient. These are the tests we will continue to use in looking at the Government’s plans to reform legal aid.

[Chris Grayling]

The Opposition are obviously finding all this rather difficult, because they agree that we have done the right thing. It is clear to me that the days of beer and sandwiches are long gone, because the Labour party has forgotten how a negotiation works. It works like this: you put forward proposals, you listen to a representation from the other side, you engage in a negotiation, and you reach a settlement. That is what we have done, and this is a good settlement for Britain. It enables us to meet our spending review targets, which is what the country would expect. What the Opposition do not like is the fact that we have done the right thing and arrived at the right objective—and we should remember that they never consulted on anything when they were in government.

The right hon. Member for Tooting (Sadiq Khan) asked me about this yesterday. I should point out that I took the unusual step of briefing the Opposition on our plans 24 hours rather than one hour in advance, because I recognised the importance of talking to the legal profession, whose members are personally affected by this change. I have tried to balance the interests of the House with those who are most personally and individually affected. That is why I shared the information with the right hon. Gentleman well in advance of any norm in the House.

The right hon. Gentleman referred to the concept of debates in the House. I seem to remember his telling the House that he would use a Labour Opposition day to debate this issue, because it was crucial, and the next Opposition day debate would be about legal aid. That never happened, because, in fact, the Labour party does not take this issue seriously at all.

The right hon. Gentleman mentioned magistrates courts, but, as he will know, our proposals were always about Crown courts. He asked about our discussions with the Bar Council. I have had many meetings with the Bar Council and the circuit leaders over the last few months. One of the two options that we have presented today was suggested to me by the circuit leaders and echoed by the Bar Council, namely the option of replicating more closely the way in which the Crown Prosecution Service works. I have received valuable support in relation to all this from the Attorney-General and the Solicitor-General, and I hope that those two options will provide a basis for a clear discussion about the best way forward.

The right hon. Gentleman made a point about small and medium-sized enterprises. The Law Society and I are clear about the fact that we expect these changes to lead to amalgamations in the SME sector. Legal aid services are currently delivered by 1,600 firms, many of which are very small. We will continue to allow those firms to carry out their own client work, but what is most important is that I provide access to justice—to which the right hon. Gentleman referred—in every part of the country. That requires me to be sure that I have firms that are financially sustainable in every part of the country, which is why we need the contracting mechanism that I am going to introduce. It is essential to ensure that there is access to justice, and that is a key part of these proposals.

Finally, the right hon. Gentleman mentioned judicial review. We intend to produce a consultation document on changes to judicial review imminently.