Michael Foot once memorably described him as a ‘semi-house trained polecat’ in recognition of his fierce right wing views. So when the same Norman Tebbit, now ennobled, proposes what can only be described as liberal minded amendments to the current Legal Aid bill it is a moment of significance.

He has put his name down to two, linked amendments that would ensure children, or parents on their behalf, will be entitled to legal aid if they need to pursue medical negligence claims. In relation to depriving claimants under the age of 18 from having access to legal aid for medical negligence claims, he told the ‘Guardian’: “In that area [the bill] may be going too far. I want to hear all the arguments. It’s right that it should be debated.” He had taken up the cause, he said, because: “I have listened and read the arguments …and I think there’s sufficient in it that we ought to [examine]. It’s nice to be on the side of the angels for once.”

At the same time the embattled Ken Clarke contributed an article in the ‘Guardian’ in which, almost apocalyptically, he said: “There should be no doubt that the system is facing an existential crisis.” He went on to say: “So for any reasonable individual it is not a question of whether we reform legal aid, but how. My approach has been to take a methodical, first-principles look at the system. The logic is simple: to determine carefully which types of cases most urgently merit scarce resources, to encourage people to use non-adversarial solutions to their problems where appropriate, and to speed up and simplify court processes where not.” He concluded: “The threat I want my reforms to pose is to a failing system, outdated methods and unreformed working practices, not to the needy.”

He will not have been pleased to hear the right wing former MP for Chingford, a supporter of the government’s draconian spending cuts, say that he feared that some of the economies proposed by the Ministry of Justice may be “going too far.”
The bill came to the House of Lords at committee stage on Tuesday. The debate got no further than amendments to clause 1, which defines the Lord Chancellor’s responsibilities. Four amendments were debated but all four were withdrawn without being put to the vote. Once again, reading the debate, it was noticeable that, apart from the ministerial team, the government had not put up anyone to speak in favour of the legal aid proposals. Committee stage continues on 10 January when further amendments will be discussed.

And finally, may I wish you all a merry Christmas and a happy New Year.

Image courtesy of The Freedom Association’s photostream on Flickr

Last Wednesday Secretary of State for Justice, Ken Clarke, made a written statement to the Commons on Competitive Tendering. The proposed timetable has yet again slipped back.
He told the Commons: “The Government believe that tendering criminal defence work for competition, alongside regulatory changes, has the potential to significantly modernise legal aid provision, improve the service provided to legal aid clients, streamline the procurement process and deliver value for money for the taxpayer.” In a thinly veiled threat he said: “Pressure on legal aid expenditure is likely to continue, increasing the need for further reform of the current arrangements for administratively set remuneration rates in the absence of competition.”
He added: “Clearly the development of a competition strategy will be likely to have a substantial impact on the market for legally aided services, as will a number of other current developments. These changes will require significant levels of engagement between the Government and the profession. We plan to begin these discussions in early 2013 once the key components of our legal aid reform package, the regulatory changes allowing alternative business structures, and the introduction of the quality assurance scheme for advocates have had time to bed down. We will publish a full formal consultation document on the competition strategy towards the end of that year.”

The revised timetable will be:

Consultation paper published: Autumn 2013

Response to consultation paper: Spring 2014

Tender opens in first competition areas: Autumn 2014

First contracts go live: Summer 2015

In an almost throw-away last paragraph of this statement he went on to say: “I would also like to inform the House that we intend, subject to parliamentary approval of the Legal Aid, Sentencing and Punishment of Offenders Bill, to implement all of the legal aid reforms in April 2013. This will include the abolition of the Legal Services Commission under the Bill and the creation of the new agency in its place.” This amounts to a six-month delay to the programme.

The ‘Guardian’ reports that Labour’s shadow justice secretary, Sadiq Khan, said: “This six-month stay of execution due to government incompetence will do little to reassure the millions of people who rely of social welfare legal aid to gain access to justice. Rather than delaying the implementation of their disastrous reforms to social welfare legal aid, which supports some of the most vulnerable people in our society, this government should abandon them completely.”

The bill goes to the committee stage in the House of Lords on 20 December. At its second reading in the chamber last month, the proposed legal aid cuts were savaged by the overwhelming majority of speakers in the debate. Since then Lord Wilson, the newest appointment to the supreme court, and Sir Nicholas Wall, president of the family division, have added their voices to the opposition. Three other supreme justices – Lord Hope, Lady Hale and Lord Dyson – have also expressed concern about the effect of government proposals to save £350m a year by reducing the availability of legal aid.

The Government showed with the Public Bodies bill last month that they are prepared to jettison proposals to ensure the passage of a bill. It will be interesting to see how they react to the Lords’ amendments and what, if anything, is thrown off the sledge to escape the chasing pack.

On Monday the Legal Aid, Sentencing and Punishment of Offenders Bill came before the Lords for its second reading. In eight hours there were over fifty contributors to a high quality debate.

Part 2 (litigation funding and costs) and part 3 (sentencing and punishment of offenders) did not feature greatly in the exchanges, and were largely approved. Overwhelmingly the debate concerned part 1 of the bill – legal aid. And overwhelmingly the contributors opposed the government’s proposals.

Baroness Scotland said: “Justice should be available in times of good and ill. In times of ill, it is more necessary than ever.” She quoted the late Lord Bingham when he argued “that one of the ingredients of the rule of law itself was that ‘means must be provided for resolving, without prohibitive cost or inordinate delay, bona fide disputes which the parties are unable themselves to resolve.” Lord Bingham went on to say that “denial of legal protection to the poor litigant who cannot afford to pay is one enemy of the rule of law.” Lord Pannick looked back to the speech of Sir Hartley Shawcross, the Attorney-General, when he introduced the Legal Aid and Advice Bill in December 1948. He said: “His concern and the concern of the Labour Government in those days was that the doors of the courts were in theory open to ordinary people, ‘just as the grill room at the Ritz Hotel is open to all’, but obtaining and acting on legal advice were ‘luxuries which were beyond their reach’.”

Viscount Simon was concerned that taking clinical negligence out of the scope of legal aid will prevent vast numbers of people ever having their case properly investigated. “Because the vast majority of clinical negligence victims are harmed at the hands of a state body – the NHS – there is a strong moral argument that the state should ensure that these people have access to justice,” he said. Baroness Gould said: “The Bill is discriminatory and will entrench inequality for women, people from minority ethnic groups, disabled people and other groups facing discrimination, all of whom will be disproportionately affected.” Drawing on some 25 years’ experience of legal aid litigation, Lord Clinton-Davis said: “The real trouble with this Bill is that there will be no savings: indeed, the very reverse. Unrepresented persons will appear before courts and tribunals and many, through no fault of their own, will make false and incoherent points. Time will be wasted.”

Baroness Kennedy expressed concern that “having ready access to a lawyer will be replaced by a telephone hotline, a sort of call centre. We all know the problems that we have with call centres in every other area of our lives; imagine it when you are in distress and in need of decent legal advice.” Lord Elystan-Morgan asserted that “unless a Government of the future pass a one-clause Bill to abolish legal aid completely, the contents of this Bill and the proposals surrounding them must constitute the most savage and most deadly attack upon the institution of legal aid in the 62 years of its existence.”

As chief prosecutor, Lord Macdonald had seen the extent of the scourge of domestic violence, its impact on those who suffered it, who were mainly women, and its impact on the children, who usually witnessed it. He said: “An inevitable consequence of the Bill’s approach to domestic violence is that more people – again, mainly women and children – will be trapped in more abusive relationships with no succour at all from our law. I venture to suggest to noble Lords that that is a situation that would bring shame upon our entire legal system.” On means testing at the police station he said: “Are we really to say that no interview is going to take place before a means test is considered, no charge may be preferred until the financial forms are filled out and passed – mortgage payments, rents, wage slips, debts, assets and all the rest of it? It is – I choose my words carefully – a foolish notion. Who is going to calculate the cost of this in wasted time and disruption to the forensic process?”

Replying to the debate, minister of state Lord McNally said: “It is not true that we brushed aside the Law Society’s wonderful ideas for saving the money in different ways. We considered its proposals very carefully…A great deal of its proposals were shuffling responsibilities and costs around Whitehall or producing new taxes, which is not the same as making savings.”

The Bill was read a second time and committed to a Committee of the Whole House, on a date to be arranged. That’s when the serious business of attempting amendments to the bill will take place.

As justices of the supreme court express fears that legal aid cuts will cause a courts logjam, a Manifesto for Family Justice has been published by an alliance of organisations which represents the rights and needs of women, children, families and victims of domestic abuse.

In a special report on the workings of the supreme court, the ‘Guardian’ outlined the concerns of some of the justices. Lord Hope, deputy president of the supreme court, said that as a product of the absence of legal aid the court of appeal is being deluged by litigants in person, which creates a logjam in itself. Lord Dyson, another supreme court judge, said he was very worried about access to justice for those who wanted to take judicial reviews or challenge tribunals. He added: “There are some very good litigants in person but there are an awful lot who, understandably, don’t know what they are doing. They feel frustrated, angry. They are not lawyers. They take masses of bad points. They waste a lot of the court’s time. And it’s a growing trend.” Lord Mance said that he couldn’t comment on the particular governmental policy, but added: “One way or other, we have to take very seriously the question of access to justice.” Lady Hale, the only woman justice in the supreme court, said that the judges worry about the extent to which denying people access to legal representation and legal advice will “change radically the role of the court in seeking to do justice.”
In its manifesto, sent to all MPs, the alliance of organisations has called upon the Government to protect vulnerable women and children; to listen to the experienced practitioners who work in family justice and who understand that mediation will not resolve a significant number of cases; and to consider with care whether the decision to remove legal aid from private family law cases will save the Government money or, in fact, cost more and lead to poor outcomes.

The chairman of the Family Law Bar Association, Stephen Cobb QC, said: “We have come together as a broad cross section of organisations deeply concerned by the consequences of the government’s proposals. The civil legal aid cuts will be bad for children, bad for women and bad for families. We are facing a disturbing new landscape in which 600,000 people will no longer receive legal aid, 68,000 children will be affected by the removal of legal aid in family cases, 54,000 fewer people will be represented in the family courts annually and 75% of existing private family law cases will no longer attract legal aid. We face the very real prospect that many children and women who have been victims of domestic abuse will have to endure the further trauma of being cross-examined by their alleged perpetrator, who will not be eligible for legal aid.”
The manifesto criticises the narrow definition of domestic abuse used in the bill, which will limit legal aid to victims of certain types of abuse. Shadow home secretary Yvette Cooper said women and children were “bearing the brunt of this government’s actions.” She added: “Denying victims of domestic violence legal support, or increasingly making victims endure cross-examination by their assailants, will remove the vital protection many vulnerable women depend upon.”

The alliance comprises the Association of Lawyers for Children, the Bar Council, Co-ordinated Action Against Domestic Abuse, the Children’s Commissioner, the Family Law Bar Association, Gingerbread, Liberty, the National Federation of Women’s Institutes, Resolution and Women’s Aid.

The legal aid, sentencing and punishment of offenders bill, which will save £350m a year from the legal aid budget, has completed its committee stage in the Commons and will be debated on the floor of the house next week.

Vivid pictures of inner cities vandalised and burning provide a sombre backdrop to the expressed fears of the National Association of Probation Officers (Napo) that prison numbers and crime rates will rise as a result of government attempts to curb youth crime.

Napo claims late amendments to the Legal Aid, Sentencing and the Punishment of Offenders bill, introduced in response to coalition concerns that it was seen to be going soft on crime, will backfire. Of particular concern is the penalty for breach of a Youth Rehabilitation Order (YRO). A YRO is the standard community sentence used for the majority of children and young people who offend. It simplifies sentencing for young people, designed to improve the flexibility of interventions, and usually contains one or more requirements which must be adhered to by that young offender. For the court to sentence a young person to a YRO it must consider the offence serious enough, and the restriction of liberty involved must be proportionate to seriousness of offence. The court will specify the date or dates by which particular requirements must be completed, and the maximum period of a YRO is three years.

Clause 70 of the Legal Aid, Sentencing and the Punishment of Offenders bill proposes a ten-fold increase in the fine for an individual who breaches a YRO, from the current £250 to £2,500. “All the people affected by this change will be under 16 and therefore by law not in paid employment,” said Harry Fletcher, assistant general secretary of Napo, as reported in the ‘Observer’. “The only way therefore they could pay the fine themselves would presumably be a massive increase in their involvement in crime, or it would fall to their parents to pay. In the event of the money not being given to the courts, presumably the individual young people or members of their families would be jailed in default.” Custody is an option for breach of a YRO only if the original offence is imprisonable or, in the case of a non-imprisonable offence, following ‘wilful and persistent’ non-compliance.

Napo are also concerned over clause 60 of the same bill, which provides for the maximum amount of time an offender can be tagged under curfew to be increased from 12 hours to 16 hours per day. Napo say the increase would make it impossible for offenders to attend full-time education or work, and that the new measure would affect more than 20,000 people. Clause 60 also increases the maximum length of the tagging from six to 12 months. “No evidence has been produced by any government over the past 20 years to show that curfew tags have any impact at all on reoffending rates,” Fletcher said. “The effect of increasing the hours spent under curfew and the length of the tagging will lead to more failures and more people imprisoned for breaches.”
These concerns come as the prison population hits a record high of 85,578, and when the Ministry of Justice is committed to closing prisons as part of a cost-cutting exercise designed to save £2bn from its £9bn budget.

Photo courtesy of Beacon Radio’s Photostream

At the moment, anyone is entitled to free advice in the police station if they are arrested. For minor cases they may get only telephone advice, for more serious cases they get a lawyer in the police station for any interview. The universal right to representation by a solicitor at a police station was enshrined in section 58(1) Police and Criminal Evidence Act 1984 in response to a series of serious miscarriages of justice in the 1970s and 80s involving unrepresented defendants.

But clause 12 of the Legal Aid, Sentencing and Punishment of Offenders Bill appears  to say that advice in the police station will in future only be available if the Government decides in the individual case that it is in the ‘interests of justice’ to do so. There would also seem to be a financial barrier to negotiate, requiring both a ‘merit’ and a ‘means’ test to be applied at the point where someone has been arrested and is in police station custody. Writing in the ‘Observer’, Jamie Doward says that legal experts, including Lord Ken Macdonald QC, a former director of public prosecutions, have expressed alarm at the proposal and questioned how it would work in practice.

Richard Miller, head of legal aid policy at the Law Society, is quoted as saying: “When someone is arrested they are in the power of the state, subject to the mercies of the police officers involved. The purpose of having a solicitor acting for them is to ensure their rights are respected, that they are not physically abused, that their confessions are not forged and they are not detained for longer than legally allowed.” He pointed out that the presence of a lawyer also protects the police from a defendant making up allegations about what happened, for instance during the course of an interrogation, and he cautioned the government against interfering in any way with the absolute right to representation in police stations. “It’s there for a very good reason. When we didn’t have it, we saw the consequences,” he said.

But then things are never quite what they seem. An interesting exchange took place in the Commons on Wednesday during the debate on the second reading of the bill. Tory MP David Burrowes declared an interest as “one who has been a duty solicitor in the police station.” He asked Ken Clarke to consult carefully about the practical implementation of proposals to limit legal aid for advice and assistance in police stations, as “losing the benefit of the informed legal advice that one needs in the police station can lead to inefficient justice.”

Mr Clarke’s response is worth quoting in full: “We will look at that and consider it carefully as we proceed. At the moment, the Bill replicates a provision taken from an earlier Bill by the Labour party. It appears to give a power to take away the right to legal aid. It appears to give a power to take away access to legal advice in the police station. The last Government legislated to do that but never did it. We have no current intentions of doing it. We will consider the issue and no doubt my hon. Friend or others will return to it in Committee. I realise that there has been some concern.”

There would seem to be some room for manoeuvre here.

The government is pressing ahead with plans to cut £350m from the more than £2bn annual legal aid bill, despite lawyers’ and campaigners’ opposition. A record response of over 5,000 consultation submissions, universally unfavourable, has produced no U-turn. Under the plans, some 600,000 cases of legal aid in England and Wales will no longer be funded if the full package goes through Parliament.

There have been some minor changes to the government’s earlier proposals. The definition of domestic violence in family disputes has been broadened to include providing legal support to those who have suffered psychological abuse. And legal aid to help children with special educational needs has also been restored. Excluding it would have saved the Ministry of Justice barely £1 million and had already caused a political outcry. Jolanta Lasota, chief executive of Ambitious about Autism, said: “For many of the parents we support, using the legal system is the only way to get a good education for their child with special educational needs. They will be hugely relieved by the government’s decision to support their right to justice for their children.”

The bill proposes the abolition of the Legal Services Commission (LSC), a non-departmental public body which looks after legal aid in England and Wales. It will be replaced by direct government administration of the legal aid system under a Director of Legal Aid Casework, who will be a civil servant answerable to government ministers. The bill also plans wholesale implementation of the Jackson reforms of civil litigation costs, which will have implications for small businesses and access to justice.

In the Commons, the justice secretary said that he would not abolish, as originally proposed, the current capital disregards for pensioners and for equity in the main home in assessing an applicant’s eligibility for legal aid. In response to expressed concerns he also dangled a carrot when he said: “On citizens advice bureaux and other forms of general advice, I hope to be able to say something on Second Reading—I am making advances, but we will see how much we can come forward with.” But he went on to confirm: “Legal aid will no longer be routinely available for most private family law cases, clinical negligence, employment, immigration, some debt and housing issues, some education cases, and welfare benefits. It will also no longer be available for squatters resisting eviction.”

Needless to say the proposals have had a thoroughly bad press. Linda Lee, president of the Law Society, said: “The government has failed to consider alternatives which would make bigger savings without removing civil legal aid from some of the most vulnerable people in society.” Stephen Cobb QC, chairman of the Family Law Bar Association, said: “The threats posed by the government’s proposals are real and potentially brutal.” Gillian Guy, of Citizen’s Advice, predicted that those in greatest need would suffer. Richard Hawkes, Chief Executive of disability charity Scope, said: “As the government presses ahead with its welfare reform agenda – which will hit disabled people hard – it is probably more important than ever that disabled people have access to legal aid and advice.”

The Legal Action Group believes the legal aid cuts are penny-wise but pound-foolish. They calculate that £1 of expenditure on civil legal help saves the government around £6 in other public expenditure. As Zoe Williams writes in the ‘Guardian’: “This might be a cut, but it isn’t a saving. It will cost us a fortune.”

Twelve months ago in the Rose Garden we were promised a coalition government guided by progressive values and reason. Justice secretary Ken Clarke seemed to have been so guided, with a green paper setting out a rehabilitative revolution in penal reform, driven by the prohibitive human and financial cost of the current regime. After the Prime Minister’s rewriting of this bill that rehabilitative revolution lies in ruins.

The way it happened on Tuesday is as noteworthy as what happened. It is, to say the least, unusual for the introduction and first reading of a major bill to be prefaced – and thoroughly upstaged – by a Prime Ministerial press conference. Having backed the Clarke plans in private, he emerged to trash them in public as the justice secretary was forced by Downing Street to ditch more than 60% of his original proposals. In a brief exchange in the Commons debate, Ken Clarke confirmed that: “The proposals that I presented for consultation and the Green Paper were the proposals of the Prime Minister, the whole Cabinet and I.” The craven capitulation that followed was caused by the outcry from the Tory right and the tabloid press, and falling poll ratings on law and order. David Cameron defended his actions thus: “It is absolutely vital that the public have confidence in a criminal justice system that the state puts in place. Public confidence is not a side issue in this debate. It is the issue.”

The headline policy reversal was the complete abandonment of the proposed 50% sentence discount for guilty pleas, now deemed “too lenient”. Going beyond the scope of the current bill in some cases, the Prime Minister announced plans to impose a surprise tough “two strikes and you’re out” mandatory life sentence. He also announced that anyone guilty of a sexual or violent offence would spend two-thirds of the sentence in prison, rather than the current half.  The justice secretary has also quietly dropped his original plan to restore the discretion of judges on sentencing, which had proposed the scrapping of David Blunkett’s minimum mandatory sentences. A Ministry of Justice impact assessment estimates the redrawn sentencing package will save just 2,650 prison places each year – or £80m – compared with the original 6,450 and £210m saving. So there is a shortfall to be found, and probation looks vulnerable.

Speaking in the Commons, Clarke said: “Public confidence in the criminal justice system is unacceptably low. That is why we want to take forward plans for a new offence, with a mandatory minimum prison sentence of six months, for adults who use a knife to threaten and endanger. We will also consult on proposals to criminalise squatting, and we will bring forward legislation to clarify the law on self-defence. In addition, I can confirm our intention to improve the use of remand and reduce the number of foreign national prisoners in our jails….We are reviewing so-called indeterminate sentences of imprisonment for public protection, with a view to replacing them with a more sensible, tough system of long, determinate sentences.”

Curiously unremarked is clause 12 of the bill. This introduces an “interests of justice test” for police station advice. At the moment, anyone is entitled to free advice in the police station if they are arrested. For minor cases they get only telephone advice, for more major cases they get a lawyer in the police station for any interview. Clause 12 appears to say that advice in the police station will only be available if the Government decides in the individual case that it is in the interests of justice to do so, and there would also seem to be a financial barrier to negotiate. The role of “Director” in this context will be crucial. At best this will be a bureaucratic nightmare, at worst it creates scope for official abuse. Not a good day for Magna Carta or Human Rights legislation.

After the battering the Government’s legal aid proposals took in the Commons it was the turn of the Lords to sink their teeth in when the proposals were the subject of a debate last Thursday.

Opening the debate, Lord Beeching pointed out that the Government’s Green Paper on legal aid reform proposes a massive cut in the civil legal aid budget of £279 million, with a much smaller reduction of around £71 million in the criminal legal aid budget. It achieves this by substantially reducing the scope of the scheme across most of the categories currently covered, while several categories are removed entirely. He said that, based on the latest Legal Services Commission data, some 725,000 cases will not be assisted, adding that the impact is concentrated on the poorest. Currently, 80 per cent of legal help cases and 90 per cent of cases where legal representation is funded involve the poorest 20 per cent of the population. As regards alternative sources of support, he said that law centres and Citizens Advice are under extreme financial pressure, both from the withdrawal of government funding implicit in the proposals of the Green Paper and from local councils struggling to cope with the largest ever reduction in government grants. He urged the Government to consider very carefully the Law Society’s proposals for savings which he reckoned could bring a total of £469 million-worth of savings. He quoted the current Lord Chief Justice as saying that the proposals fail “to recognise the depth of the problem,” and “would lead to a huge increase in the incidence of unrepresented litigants, with serious implications for the quality of justice and for the administration of the justice system.”

Baroness Sherlock focused on one particular aspect of the Government’s plans for legal aid, the proposal to take social welfare law out of scope. She said that of the cuts to be made, more than £l00 million will be cut from social welfare legal aid and, as a result, most social welfare law and legal advice will no longer be covered. This is at a time when the Welfare Reform Bill, described as the biggest change to the welfare system for over 60 years, is currently making its way through Parliament. She concluded: “My concern is that when Governments make changes on this scale, mistakes inevitably happen. Given all those changes, does this feel like a good time to stop providing advice and help to benefits claimants in those settings? I think not.” Lord Thomas’s concern was medical negligence, his fear being that the removal of legal aid “will deny access to justice to some of the most vulnerable groups in the country – children, the sick and disabled. The need to streamline costs and for systems to be efficient should not be at their expense.”

Baroness Helena Kennedy drew attention to something Jonathan Djanogly, the justice department Minister in charge of legal aid, said at the Conservative Party conference last year. He said: “Legal aid can be a good filler for those lawyers out of work or women who want to get back into the legal job market after having children.” Baroness Kennedy said: “It shows an attitude to legal aid which is to misunderstand it.” Her concern was also medical negligence cases, saying that “removing legal aid completely will mean that poor people who suffer terrible things within our hospitals will not be able to sue.”

Replying to the lengthy debate, Minister of State Lord McNally said: “We are still in consultation. I cannot say that the consultation is going to produce some Pauline conversion at the last moment. As I say, we have made a commitment to savings and we intend to deliver them.” Then, like Jonathan Djanogly in the Commons earlier, he played a dead bat. A contributor to the BBC’s online commentary while the debate was taking place said: “Poor McNally, poor performance. Mostly today…he’s just reading out word for word the introduction to the Green Paper published last November. Does he know? Pretty disrespectful to the House if he does. Civil servants in MoJ can’t be bothered to write him a speech and he can’t be bothered to check.” Another contributor said: “Only one speaker in favour of the reforms…That sums up the whole debate perfectly. Nobody was interested in seeking to defend what the government is doing, even those on the government benches.”

Picture courtesy of UK Parliament’s photostream

Liberal Democrat MP Dr Julian Huppert secured a debate on legal aid in the Commons last week. He said it was timely because although the Government consultation, which has received around 5,000 replies, has closed no response has been published.

His main concern was the detrimental effect the proposed cuts would have on the disadvantaged. He said that women will be disproportionately affected by the changes in legal aid as they are more often the recipients of it and less often have their own finances in place. Children and young people will also be disproportionately affected, partly because women make up the majority of primary care givers. Similar concerns apply in relation to disabled people, whether young or old, instancing the Government plan to remove legal aid relating to matters of special educational need. He was pleased that asylum will remain within the scope of legal aid, but extremely concerned that other immigration cases have been excluded. He said: “Even under existing arrangements, immigration legal aid providers are struggling to remain viable; if we confine legal aid to asylum, it is doubtful whether good quality practitioners will continue to be available. There is already a surfeit of poor quality lawyers and advisers working in this field, and we would all benefit from better provision because many of them are not up to scratch.”

Labour MP Yvonne Fovargue quoted the Legal Action Group when she said: “The personal, social and economic consequences of removing access to justice for so many people is unknown and unforgiveable.” A former chief executive of St Helens Citizens Advice for more than 20 years, she deplored the loss of most early intervention advice, with access available solely through a telephone gateway. “I believe that such proposals will disadvantage the most vulnerable in our society—the disabled, the elderly, those on a low income with a pre-paid mobile phone who often ring about debt issues, those with mental health issues, those whose first language is not English and many others” she said. Citizens Advice has produced detailed briefings showing the unintended consequences of the Government’s proposals on social welfare law work. Its cost-benefit analysis makes a strong case for retaining and even strengthening its role. It estimates that if funding were no longer available for these categories of law, at least £172 million of additional costs would accrue for both state and society. MP Jeremy Corbyn said: “The number of cases that are dealt with by legal aid in this country at the moment is 934,000…The cuts being proposed will mean that more than 600,000 people will not have access to legal aid. If we want a fair, decent and just society, everyone must have access to the law.”

After a universally negative critique of the green paper from his fellow MPs, Justice Minister Jonathan Djanogly wound up the session with a stonewall recitation of its contents, without giving away any potential significant concession. But the immutable timetable of Parliamentary affairs did leave one cliff hanger. Much had been made during the debate that domestic violence cannot refer simply to physical violence. Dr Huppert said: “We must all be concerned about people suffering the threat of violence and mental torment. I hope that the Government will take seriously the criticisms that they have received on that point and will clarify and strengthen their definition of domestic violence so that those at risk have access to justice and are protected.” The Minister said: “In the consultation, we proposed that private law family legal aid should continue to be available where there is objective evidence of domestic violence. We have asked for views on what might provide objective evidence and therefore trigger private family law legal aid. We have been giving careful consideration to the points raised in response—.” At which point the Chairman said: “Order. I am afraid that we have run out of time for this debate.” It was time to discuss the Avon Ring Road (M4 Link).