Legal Aid, Sentencing and Punishment of Offenders Bill

Debate between Yvonne Fovargue and Lord Clarke of Nottingham

Tuesday 17th April 2012 Commons Chamber

[Mr Clarke]

I value citizens advice bureaux as highly as the right hon. Gentleman, and ever since the Bill was introduced we have said that we will come forward with proposals to improve the support given by the Treasury. As I have said, at the time of the Budget there was an announcement, which was not much noticed at the time, of £20 million a year to be made available for voluntary advice.

For most citizens advice bureaux, legal aid is not the biggest source of their funding, and some do not get any legal aid funding at all. Their advice is very valuable general advice to people with a combination of debt, housing and every other problem; it is not specifically legal advice in most cases. Our Department is not the biggest Department that contributes to such bureaux; the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills has the biggest budget, for debt advice and other forms, and I think that it has ring-fenced its budget and still provides funding.

Most citizens advice bureaux have lost a lot of money because local government funding has been cut quite severely, and the Government are producing money from the Treasury to compensate in part for that, so we—not my Department; the Cabinet Office—are now distributing that £20 million to ensure that such valuable general advice is still available. What we cannot do is start inventing legal aid scope, or fail to narrow legal aid scope, as a roundabout way of maintaining funding for citizens advice bureaux, many of which do not receive legal aid funding now—giving them funding that is spent on general advice as much as on legal advice. Of course, the more we extend the scope to help the citizens advice bureaux, which are busy lobbying the House, the more we also help professional lawyers, who also qualify for all the legal aid scope that we are happily enlarging.

[Yvonne Fovargue]

The citizens advice bureaux that are so busy lobbying are actually lobbying on behalf of their clients. Some 77% of the funding being removed from the scope of legal aid is going not from solicitors’ firms, but from citizens advice bureaux and law centres—and from specialist legal advice. The Legal Services Commission will not provide the money, which I remind the Secretary of State is £160 for a legal aid case at the early stage of a welfare and benefits case, but it prevents the case from becoming much more expensive later.

[Mr Clarke]

The hon. Lady’s experience of citizens advice bureaux greatly exceeds my own, but I am pretty certain that fewer than half of such bureaux receive any legal aid funding at all. I have not sought to deny the financial problems of citizens advice bureaux, but we cannot solve them by being so generous in scope with legal aid when the issues involved in most welfare cases are not legal problems. What people require in these difficult times is general advice on a general combination of problems from which they suffer.

Oral Answers to Questions

Debate between Yvonne Fovargue and Lord Clarke of Nottingham

Tuesday 8th November 2011 Commons Chamber

[Yvonne Fovargue (Makerfield) (Lab)]

The Money Advice Service has sacked 100 front-line staff in order to spend more money on publicity. Does the Secretary of State now regret removing nearly all debt advice from the scope of legal aid, and what cross-departmental discussions is he having about the future of such advice?

[Mr Kenneth Clarke]

I am very sorry to hear what the hon. Lady has said, but I am not sure whether the issue is the responsibility of my Department; it may be the responsibility of the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills. However, I will certainly check, because it is extremely important for advice to be available at what is a difficult time for many people. Advice on debt is, unfortunately, one of the things that many people require—not only foreign Governments, but a fair number of our own citizens.

Oral Answers to Questions

Debate between Yvonne Fovargue and Lord Clarke of Nottingham

Tuesday 28th June 2011 Commons Chamber

[Mr Clarke]

We need the right sentence for the individual circumstances of each offender. I have never suggested that we get rid of all short-term sentences of imprisonment because sometimes magistrates and others have absolutely no alternative, but we are interested in strengthening community punishments and giving more confidence to magistrates and the public that those can have a genuine effect. We are proposing to strengthen the community payback scheme, which is unpaid work. Improving the extent to which tagging and curfews are available is one part of trying to make sure that, where they are likely to work, non-custodial community sentences are employed with some confidence by the courts concerned.

[Yvonne Fovargue (Makerfield) (Lab)]

7. What assessment he has made of the potential effect on group action litigation against multinational corporations of his proposals for reform to civil litigation.

Sentencing Reform/Legal Aid

Debate between Yvonne Fovargue and Lord Clarke of Nottingham

Tuesday 21st June 2011 Commons Chamber

[Mr Clarke]

That is why we have proposals to improve rehabilitation and reduce reoffending by introducing a payment-by-results system. That will normally involve consortia of people coming together to rehabilitate prisoners, and payment will be based on the results they achieve. The first pilots are already in place: we have contracts in Peterborough and Doncaster, and others are about to start in Manchester and several other local authority areas. Ideally, they will involve, for example, a private sector body raising the capital with a voluntary body and a not-for-profit organisation; they can come together in a suitable consortium, first to start doing something about the offender when he is in prison and then following up on that and trying to make it far less likely that he will reoffend after he leaves prison. The payment-by-results approach to rehabilitation is one of the Government’s most significant innovations in this field, and it is making very good progress.

[Yvonne Fovargue (Makerfield) (Lab)]

What assessment has the Secretary of State made of the availability of face-to-face welfare advice from advice agencies such as citizens advice bureaux and law centres in 2013 when the Welfare Reform Bill will come into effect at precisely the same time as welfare benefits are removed from scope?

[Mr Clarke]

I have already stated that I am not in a position today to say what we can do to support citizens advice bureaux and similar organisations providing advice in the legal field and other areas such as welfare. The Government are actively considering that, and I hope we will be in a position to make an announcement soon. Part of the problem is relevant to my field, but it extends into other areas such as welfare reform. The Government are conscious of the fact that we must do something to fill some of the unavoidable gaps that have been left at present, mainly by local authorities being forced to cut the grants they can give.