Sentencing Reform/Legal Aid

William Cash Excerpts

Tuesday 21st June 2011 Commons Chamber

[Mr Clarke]

That is just a very broad-brush defence of what the hon. Gentleman believes is the need to carry on paying £38 a head per taxpayer for the current legal aid system. Of course some legal aid is absolutely essential—crucial—to the liberties of our subjects and it is one of the standards of our society that we provide legal aid for people in extremis who would otherwise have no means of urging their cause. We have this grand, across-the-board system that finances what we can sometimes see is an inferior way of resolving disputes if we look for better methods of doing so. That will apply in Birmingham as elsewhere. The previous Government knew that the system had to be reformed; they simply could not make up their mind about what they were going to do to reform it. We are making some very well-considered proposals, which have been consulted on and thus modified to a certain extent, for getting the system back to a sensible size.

[Mr William Cash (Stone) (Con)]

The Lord Chancellor said that he had been personally impressed by the representations of the senior judiciary. Given that they said it would not be right as a matter either of principle or of practice to go beyond the maximum discount of one third, who are the wishy-washy liberals who have induced this row and all the fuss and problems that we have witnessed in the press over the past few weeks?

[Mr Clarke]

We did have quite a lot of support and it was not all from wishy-washy liberals. We also had some opponents who opposed the policy for reasons that I completely disagreed with. I was impressed by the input I got from serious people in the criminal justice system who are all used to discounts for early guilty pleas. Anyone who has ever had anything to do with criminal justice knows that there has always been a discount for pleading guilty early. The public do not know that and they do not like it when they are first told it, but there are good reasons for it. However, a reduction by half proved to be too much and I could not find any other way of resolving the issue and getting over the undoubted difficulties, so if there are any bleeding-heart liberals left who still think we are going to have a reduction by half, I am sorry to disappoint them, but at least my hon. Friend and I are now agreed on where we are.