Legal Aid Reform

Sarah Wollaston Excerpts

Thursday 27th June 2013 Commons Chamber

[Simon Reevell (Dewsbury) (Con)]

I declare an interest: I practise at the criminal Bar. I will make my observations on the criminal justice system and the implications for criminal justice legal aid. I will start by saying that there is no reason in principle why the Ministry of Justice should not be asked to look at reducing its departmental spending or why its expenditure on legal aid should not be part of that review. I will not say to my constituents, who have been affected by all sorts of spending reductions across Departments, that somehow there is special pleading as far as criminal justice and criminal justice legal aid are concerned.

However, that does not mean that there are not some fundamental difficulties with the consultation proposals. First, simply as a Conservative, I do not like proposals that appear set on driving small businesses out of business. The years of dedication and expertise of those small businesses seems to me to be far more important than the fact that the business happens to be law. The principle is that we should be looking to encourage small businesses, not driving their business into the arms of large corporations.

[Dr Sarah Wollaston (Totnes) (Con)]

Does my hon. Friend agree that in places such as rural Devon we will see a mass driving out of those small businesses in small towns and that people will have to travel large distances to seek justice?

[Simon Reevell]

My hon. Friend makes the same point very well.

Secondly, as a Conservative, I do not like the removal of choice from the market. It does not really matter that the individual concerned happens to be a defendant in criminal proceedings; after all, at that stage he or she is presumed innocent until proven guilty—we do still have that. The removal of choice in the selection of representation concerns me. The idea that the state will prosecute, that it will contract those who defend, and that those contractors are likely, under these proposals, to employ the defence advocate, is worrying. I have dealt with cases that have involved issues of security and of taking on the Government, for example in relation to what the previous Government did in Iraq. I wonder whether someone working for an organisation that had a contract with the Government would feel as able as I did to take on those issues and seek to expose them in the course of a trial, regardless of consequences, as a member of the independent Bar.

There are smaller difficulties. The hon. Member for Redcar (Ian Swales) referred to the proposed fee structure. In fact, that already exists elsewhere. Some military cases in Germany are paid for on that principle, but with an escape clause, as it were, that recognises that it is not suitable for the more serious cases. That suggests that it is therefore not suitable to be rolled out across the Crown court system for the vast majority of criminal cases.

The expression of support for an independent Bar in the consultation document is inconsistent with the model that is proposed, under which advocacy would be kept in-house to offset the reductions necessary to take part in the tendering process. That has implications not only for members of the independent Bar but for judicial recruitment and for the availability of experienced prosecutors. The Ministry of Justice might want to think about what it is doing not only in relation to those who defend in the Crown court but to where it will get those to whom it looks to prosecute serious cases—the murders, the rapes, the woundings, and matters of that sort.

Having criticised the consultation document, it does contain something that has not been offered to any other group of people. I used to be a soldier. Soldiers were not told, “These are the proposals—if you’ve got some of your own we’ll look at them”; they were simply told, “These are the proposals.” It is the same for teachers, firemen and everybody else. Lawyers are being told, “These are the proposals—if you’ve got alternatives and they achieve the same result, then the Department will go with them.” Anybody who works in the criminal justice system knows that savings can be made.