Legal aid

Stephen Timms Excerpts

Tuesday 14th December 2010 Westminster Hall

[Jeremy Corbyn (Islington North) (Lab)]

It is a pleasure to be under your chairpersonship, Mrs Riordan. I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Westminster North (Ms Buck) on securing the debate.

When legal aid was first introduced in 1949, the late Arthur Skeffington said that the law at that time was like the Ritz, in that those who could afford to pay had access to it, while those who could not did not. Legal aid was introduced, and it is fundamental to giving everybody in this country access to justice.

When the Green Paper came out, paragraph 1.2 of the summary said:

“The Government strongly believes that access to justice is a hallmark of a civil society”,

which is great. The problem is the rest of the Green Paper; it starts well, but it is all downhill after that. We need to examine a number of issues relating to the Green Paper.

The background has to be that cuts were already being made in legal aid, and many of us in the Chamber who were in the previous Parliament were very concerned about that. Indeed, we raised those concerns consistently with Ministers, because the cuts were leaving the most marginalised, vulnerable people with no redress whatever through the legal system. That deeply concerns me.

The cuts have been accompanied by a series of ill-informed, unfair media attacks on the entire legal profession and the legal aid system, which have been led by the Daily Mail, the Daily Express and the Evening Standard. Those newspapers routinely print isolated and outrageous figures about payments to some barristers, while at no time looking at the reality of the number of legal aid firms that are paid so little that they can no longer afford to represent anybody and have gone out of business. In inner-urban areas such as the one that I represent, which is the eighth poorest part of the whole country, many people simply cannot get any representation whatever, because there is no legal aid lawyer to deal with them.

Let me quote from a letter dated 1 October 2010—many colleagues will have seen something similar at various times. It says:

“URGENT INFORMATION

CLOSURE OF

SHEIKH & CO SOLICITORS

Non practising as of Midnight on 30th September 2010”

It continues:

“We were unable to secure viable indemnity insurance despite our best efforts particularly in view of uncertainty surrounding the legal aid contracts and so it means Sheikh & Co cannot provide legal services any more.”

This was a busy local practice dealing with a whole range of issues, including housing, immigration and family and education matters, and its closure left thousands of people with no representation. Their files will be passed on through the appropriate body to another solicitor, but that solicitor may go under, and the files will then move on to somebody else and somebody else again. Along the way, they will be lost, which means that very poor and vulnerable people will be left without any representation whatever.

I am proud to represent my constituency in Parliament. I am also proud of Islington law centre, which does fantastic work. When I visited it a couple of weeks ago, the director told me that a

“10% cut across the board is being proposed”

in its Legal Services Commission contract funding and that

“we have been cut hard in both housing and employment, where, although we were ranked first in terms of our tender score, we have been given a much smaller contract from mid-November than we had previously”.

The director added that that will mean

“250 less employment clients per annum that we can help, and 185 less housing clients. I expect the total cut next year to be around £130,000,”

which is more than two full-time equivalent caseworkers. That is a busy law centre, which is doing its best. Such events could be replicated all over the country at hard-working law centres.

When the Minister replies, I hope that he will recognise the value of law centres and the need to give them support and funding.

[Stephen Timms (East Ham) (Lab)]

rose—

[Jeremy Corbyn]

I also hope that he will recognise that, without law centres and legal aid practices at solicitors, many of our most vulnerable constituents will simply go without any access to justice whatever.

--- Later in debate ---

[Jeremy Corbyn]

Actually, Mrs Riordan, I was giving way to my right hon. Friend the Member for East Ham (Stephen Timms). I was not concluding my contribution. If you want me to conclude, I suppose I must, but I would be grateful if you gave me just a bit more time.

[Stephen Timms]

I am grateful to my hon. Friend and to you, Mrs Riordan.

I wanted to pick up my hon. Friend’s point about advice services. I wonder whether it struck him, as it struck me, that the Green Paper suggests that costly legal advice can be substituted with much less costly voluntary advice services. The problem is—and the author of the Green Paper does not seem to realise it—that most such voluntary services are themselves funded by legal aid, and that that funding will go if the proposals are implemented.

[Jeremy Corbyn]

My hon. Friend makes a powerful point, which is true. Legal aid funding goes through law centres, Citizens Advice and all kinds of other advice agencies, which will be cut. In any event, none of the advice services’ funding is ring-fenced in local authority terms. I have done a head-count audit of my borough, and there is probably less one-to-one advice available than there was 25 years ago. I suspect that colleagues could tell similar stories. We need fair access to justice.

The Law Society briefing for the debate is very good. It notes:

“The cuts in scope and eligibility for civil legal aid will mean that many fewer people will be able to bring cases to court”.

It continues by pointing out that

“solicitors will either find other areas of work or ‘cherry pick’ cases”.

We have many brilliant law students in this country—many brilliant young people who want to go into law and do their very best. They often end up, whether they want to or not, doing property and commercial law, because that is where the money can be made and where they can get work. They do not do legal aid because there is not enough money around to do it with. There are not enough companies doing legal aid work. So we have amazing levels of representation for well-off people, in commercial or corporate cases, but we do not have the same availability for criminal, housing, immigration or family cases.

There is a lot that I could say, but I take your earlier hint, Mrs Riordan—you do not want me to go on too long. It was very subtly put, if I may say so. I have two quick points that I want to make. The idea of separating family law cases so that legal aid will be given if violence is involved, but not if there is no violence, is utterly absurd. I am sure that we have all seen how families can implode under many pressures. The degeneration of a relationship into a battle and a court case can get very nasty. Mediation does not always work—of course we all want it to, but it does not always. That can degenerate into violence. If sensible, effective legal advice is available at a much earlier stage, much of that degeneration into something far worse can be prevented.

I am pleased that the Green Paper specifically excludes any cut in representation for asylum cases. I welcome that and pay tribute to the Minister for it. Those who face deportation in asylum cases, possibly with the prospect of death or torture on their return to where they have come from, deserve legal aid. I absolutely defend that, and I am sure—or at least hope—that every hon. Member in the Chamber would too.

However, in immigration cases, which are often very complicated, legal aid is limited; it is available for dealing with detention, but not for the case itself. A family who are put in detention—quite wrongly, in my view, if children are involved—can get legal aid to try to get out of detention, but not to deal with the burden of the case. That seems a non sequitur; either we support immigration cases or we do not. I hope that the Minister will recognise that the injustices surrounding that state of affairs, in particular with regard to applications under articles 6 and 8 of the European convention on human rights, are very important and that such cases deserve legal aid.

The late Sir Henry Hodge, who was a judge at the immigration appeal tribunal, constantly made references to the Legal Services Commission wanting sufficient resources to make representation available. An immigration appeal where there is no representation for the applicant, but there is representation for the Home Office, is unbelievably, blatantly and obviously unfair. It is not a credible way of doing things.

I urge the Minister to think again, seriously, about those aspects of the matter, and to remember the principle of access to justice for all. That will not be possible if the cuts go through.

--- Later in debate ---

[The Solicitor-General]

I am sure that the Under-Secretary of State for Justice, my hon. Friend the Member for Huntingdon, will ensure that the Ministry of Justice addresses those points and I am certain that my hon. Friend the Member for Aberconwy (Guto Bebb) will want to participate in the consultation process.

Another point that occurred to me as I listened to the debate is that none of the arguments that I heard this morning is new. Indeed, I was making some of them myself between 1997 and 1999 as the Opposition spokesperson for the Lord Chancellor’s Department, when Geoff Hoon was the junior Minister dealing with this area of public policy. He was introducing proposals that turned into the so-called Access to Justice Act 1999. At the time, I suggested to him that those proposals would have had Attlee spinning in his grave.

However, to be in government is to have to make decisions and choices. The main factor that we have to address at the moment is the economic difficulties that the national budget faces. Every day, we are paying £120 million in interest payments alone. Would it not be better if we could spend that money on legal advice and representation? However, we have to make choices and I do not think that the hon. Member for Westminster North ducked that issue. In essence, she said that she accepts that choices have to be made, and that reductions in public expenditure have to be made. It is the pace with which and the areas where the cuts are made that she finds controversial.

[Stephen Timms]

The Solicitor-General is right to praise the work of citizens advice bureaux. However, the National Association of Citizens Advice Bureaux says that at the moment, a quarter of its funding nationally comes from legal aid. That funding will be entirely lost if these proposals go through unamended. Are the Government looking at an alternative way of funding welfare advice services across the country?

[The Solicitor-General]

I want to make two points. First—yes, of course the Government are doing so, and that is the point of the consultation. I hope that the right hon. Gentleman will participate in that consultation. Secondly, citizens advice bureaux are funded not just by central Government, but by other funding streams. Some are funded by as many as 15 funding streams.

That is not a complete answer to the right hon. Gentleman’s question, but I will throw back to him, as a former Treasury Minister, a question: where do we find the money at a time when we are spending £120 million a day on interest alone? We have to make difficult choices.

I accept that none of the answers that the Government come up with during this period will provide anybody with complete satisfaction. Nobody will leave this debate and go home for Christmas dancing in the streets about what I have said. However, we have to be realistic and face the hard choices that the previous Government have left us.