Legal Aid

Tom Brake Excerpts

Wednesday 11th May 2011 Westminster Hall

[Tom Brake (Carshalton and Wallington) (LD)]

I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Cambridge (Dr Huppert) on securing the debate and setting out succinctly many of the challenges that the coalition Government face in both reining in the budget and minimising the impact on those reliant on legal aid. What is not in dispute today is the fact that budget reductions need to be made. Given that the Ministry of Justice’s budget consists principally of staffing costs, prisons and legal aid, there are not many areas to which the Government can go to identify savings. It is also true that a number of organisations that I, and I am sure other Members, have met have confirmed that their view is that there are potential savings. The Law Society and others have set out ways in which those savings could be made.

I will not run over the growth in expenditure on legal aid in recent years, because it is well known. It is clear that the budget reductions will have an impact on many organisations. I do not know whether the Minister has read all 5,000 submissions; I doubt he has, and we would not expect him to have, but he may have read a sample of them and I am sure he has had a large number of meetings with a range of organisations, so he will have heard the main concerns. I thank him for meeting me with my local citizens advice bureau and Citizens Advice to hear their concerns about some of the proposals.

Given the limited time, I will restrict my comments to telephone advice, medical negligence, the impact assessment and savings. I think that telephone advice can play a key role. It is accessible to people who do not feel able to access a face-to-face contact because they are put off by it in a way that they might not be put off by telephone contact. However, there remain many queries about how telephone advice will work.

There will clearly be people, as other Members have said, for whom telephone advice is inappropriate, and therefore a clear pathway from initial contact, to a referral, to a face-to-face contact will need to be provided by that service. How will urgent inquiries be dealt with? What referral process will be used to ensure that the calls are passed to the relevant organisation to deal with them? Can the Minister do any more to flesh those details out? I know many organisations that would be interested to hear more.

I am sure that many Members have been lobbied about medical negligence—particularly those cases involving children who have been most seriously affected by it and how they can continue to be supported. As an aside, the Minister might want to talk to Health Ministers about whether introducing a duty of candour—in other words, requiring health professionals to confirm when an accident has taken place—could play a role in reducing the need for cases to go to court in the first place. Other Members have referred to family law, so I will not touch on that.

As the impact assessment confirms, because black and minority ethnic communities, women and low-income groups are more represented in the group of people who receive legal aid, the impact on them will be disproportionate. However, I hope that the coalition Government will still want to redress that, not simply accept that it is the case—put more emphasis on ensuring that those groups are not disproportionately affected by the change because they are disproportionally represented in the group that receives legal aid.

Other Members, including my hon. Friend the Member for Cambridge, referred to the savings that we can derive through providing advice services: £1 of legal aid expenditure on housing advice saves £2.34, and employment advice saves £7.13. I hope that the Minister, if not now then later, can provide some analysis of the impact of the measures that we, as a coalition Government, are proposing, to ensure that we do not see the cost-shunting that many people believe will arise as a result of the changes. Simply passing costs on to other organisations or Government Departments will not be helpful.

Finally, my hon. Friend the Member for Cambridge referred to the proposals from the Law Society. How will those concrete, detailed suggestions be taken on board as part of the consultation process? I am sure that the Minister is also aware of the proposals that Keir Starmer, the Director of Public Prosecutions, put forward on how costs can be saved in the wider legal arena.

I hope that the Minister will respond to those points. The Government clearly and quite rightly have to address the budget, but there are ways and means of addressing it most effectively. I hope that they are looking carefully at the proposals on the table from a range of organisations about other ways to address it and that they take those proposals on board where appropriate.