From today's Law Society Gazette:
The Legal Aid Sentencing and Punishment of Offenders passed its second reading in the House of Lords last night after an eight-hour battering from peers. Following a debate in which 51 of the 54 members who rose to speak criticised the bill, justice minister Lord McNally, responding for the government, promised ‘to listen’ to the 'strong concerns' raised particularly in relation to domestic violence and clinical negligence.
On domestic violence he said: ‘These issues have been raised with considerable passion and they merit closer scrutiny in committee.’ He also suggested peers put down an amendment in relation to proposals concerning advice at the police station.
McNally said he hoped the Lords would use the committee stage for a ‘useful and productive’ examination of the bill. ‘I cannot go further on these issues than saying that we will listen, but we will listen to some very serious points that were made in a very serious way,’ he said.
During the debate the bill faced an onslaught from peers on all sides of the house. Members called the cuts in scope ‘catastrophic’, a ‘huge assault on access to justice’, and ‘constitutionally wrong’. They said the bill attacked the rights of the sick, vulnerable, bereaved and injured, and ‘will bring shame on our legal system’, undermine the rule of law, and result in a ‘flood of litigants in person’.
Little time was spent on the civil costs reforms in part 2 of the bill or the sentencing reforms in part 3. With the exception of crossbencher Lord Woolf and a few Conservative peers, who broadly agreed with Lord Justice Jackson, those peers who did allude to Part 2 stressed that Jackson had predicated his proposals for civil litigation reform on the fact that legal aid would remain for clinical negligence claims.
The Labour peer and former legal aid minister Lord Bach said the government’s proposals were ‘deeply wrong’ in three distinct ways. He said they are ‘immoral’ and look only at the impact assessments that the government itself produced. The cuts represent a ‘serious denial of access to justice’; and will cost ‘much, much more’ than they save, he said. Bach ended with a plea to peers to stand up against the government, which has ‘made the wrong choice’.
‘If necessary the house must take up the fight and stand up for those who cannot stand up for themselves. The house has a tradition of looking after the interests of those in our society who have little power. In this of all cases, we must not let them down,’ he said.
Defending the proposals, McNally cited the need for the government to reduce the budget deficit. ‘There is no getting away from it: the Ministry of Justice is a department with a budget of just over £9bn. Its commitment was to cuts of £2bn in a department that spends on only four things - prisons, probation, legal aid and staff and court administration.
‘Each of those has taken a hit. If noble lords are successful in stopping the changes we have made in legal aid, those other parts will take a hit as well,’ he said.
He added: ‘There are no soft options and no easy ways in this.’
Elsewhere in his speech McNally said the legal profession ‘is in flux’ and criticised lawyers for failing to fully appreciate the impact that alternative business structures will have way the profession is organised and advice delivered.
He said: ‘I heard the disparaging of telephone advice, but the world is changing and lots of people receive advice on the net and by telephone. Indeed, I went to the Law Society's prize giving for solicitor firms of the year and I was intrigued by how many of the prize winners now have web pages where people can go. You can get lots of advice for free before you press the button to hire them. It is a changing world in some of these things.’
The minister said that alternative saving proposals suggested by the Law Society would simply shuffle costs around Whitehall without saving money. But he said it was ‘not true’ that the suggestions had been brushed aside. Indeed he said the government is ‘looking very closely’ into suggestions for more efficient prosecution and reimbursement of legal aid funds.
McNally rejected the suggestion that the cuts of £350m to the £2.1bn budget were an assault on the principle of the provision of legal aid. He said: ‘It invites the question: what is so magic about £2.2bn or £2.1bn against £1.7bn? It is less, and it means cuts, but it is not a move away from some Absolute commitment to pay for everything, whatever, which seemed to be the thrust of some of the speeches earlier.’
But he said the government had to operate within its budget. McNally said: ‘These reforms will still be spending £1.7bn a year on child protection proceedings, most judicial reviews, international child abduction, special educational needs, community care, discrimination, debt and housing cases where a home is at immediate risk, mental health cases and 95% of funding for child parties.’
The bill will now go to its committee stage where it will face closer scrutiny before its third reading in the Lords.
