Legal aid

Debate between Stephen Timms and Lord Garnier

Tuesday 14th December 2010 Westminster Hall

[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.