Kamran Majid and the Legal Services Commission

(Limited Text - Ministerial Extracts only)

Tuesday 3rd September 2013 Westminster Hall

[The Minister for Policing and Criminal Justice (Damian Green)]

I am grateful to the hon. Member for Birmingham, Selly Oak (Steve McCabe) for calling this debate, and I appreciate the passion with which he presented his case. I should also put on the record my appreciation for the information that he sent me before the debate, so that I could consider the points he proposed to make.

I will make some general remarks, and then move on to the hon. Gentleman’s specific points, but I note at the outset that an entirely independent body, the PHSO, has rejected Mr Majid’s case. I hear what the hon. Gentleman says in criticism of that body, but it is worth noting that it is entirely independent of the LSC and of the Government more widely.

I have obviously listened carefully to what the hon. Gentleman said. I hope that he agrees that we should be very proud of our legal system: it is a valuable contributor to our society, and the Government recognise that legal aid is a vital component of the system. I am well aware of the important role that duty solicitors, such as his constituent, play in the criminal justice system.

I have always made it clear that defence lawyers are central to the criminal justice system. Throughout this year, I have taken their views on how to make the system more efficient and on what we can do to help them work more efficiently. Today, there are about 6,500 duty solicitors—qualified professionals who can offer advice and assistance to those who, without their own lawyer, are being questioned by the police or facing charges before the courts. The system ensures that all eligible people have access to legal advice from suitably qualified legal representatives, whose role is crucial to ensuring that the criminal justice system can operate efficiently.

Last year alone, there were 734,000 acts of assistance to people being questioned by the police, at a cost of £160 million to the taxpayer. A similar scheme for solicitors in the magistrates court operated at a cost of almost £22 million, providing help to individuals in courts across England and Wales. The Legal Aid Agency—as the hon. Gentleman correctly said, that is what the Legal Services Commission has become—has a statutory responsibility to run and maintain both the police station and the magistrates court duty solicitor schemes in England and Wales, which it does by entering into contracts with firms of solicitors. The last tender process was for the 2010 standard crime contract, with contracts starting on 14 July 2010.

The case made by the hon. Gentleman is that his constituent raised a concern with him about how the then LSC dealt with his complaint regarding the allocation of duty solicitor slots in the summer of 2010. From his contribution, I can appreciate that the period in question and since has been extremely distressing for his constituent. What I can usefully do now is explain a little more about how the process works so that we can understand more about how the issue arose in the first place.

The first point on which to be clear, and this directly addresses one of the hon. Gentleman’s points, is that contracts are not awarded to individual duty solicitors, but to legal aid firms. The proportion of slots that each organisation receives is determined by the number of duty solicitors that it has registered with the LAA, formerly the LSC. The allocation of slots is typically refreshed every six months, and organisations are required to submit the necessary forms to demonstrate how many duty solicitors they employ. A deadline is set to ensure fair and equal treatment for all the firms involved.

[Steve McCabe]

Does the Minister think that it was just bad luck that, with those 14 people I mentioned, there was no effort to implement that part of the contract—for those who were granted the exemption before the termination of Knights Solicitors’ contract and those granted it afterwards—or that my constituent has clearly been dealt with differently from the other 14 people?

[Damian Green]

I hear what the hon. Gentleman says. He kindly gave me advance notice of some of his points, so I can happily guarantee that I will go away and look at some of the details. However, there are some details that are worth setting on the record now.

I have talked about the deadline for slot allocation, and there are two advantages to that approach. First, it ensures that firms have six months of stability of duty solicitor slots, enabling them to plan their workloads. Secondly, it provides administrative benefits to the LSC as rotas are issued at fixed points without the need for many amendments. That is essential given the scale of the task in assembling the rotas. There are more than 250 individual schemes with almost 800 rotas generated at each point.

In the case of the hon. Gentleman’s constituent, there was a deadline for all firms to submit their list of duty solicitors by 14 May 2010. It would not have been possible to accept new submissions in June 2010 without treating firms differently in the tendering process. Owing to the finite number of slots available, late additions would affect the allocation set for all firms that work on those schemes. No other firm was requesting an extension to the May deadline. If a firm wishes to challenge its duty slot allocation, there are options available to it to appeal under the terms of its contract. However, the approach to slot allocation has been the subject of attention during 2013 as part of the debates that have been taking place following the publication in April of the Government’s proposals to transform legal aid.

Those proposals have focused on criminal legal aid, which accounts for around £1 billion of the overall legal aid budget of just under £2 billion. Obviously, no sensible Government can overlook such a sizeable portion of Government spending, which is why we have embarked on the proposals to transform legal aid to deliver a more credible and efficient system.

The Law Society, as part of its response to the consultation, has highlighted some inefficiencies within the current system. In particular, it has focused on the precise issue that the hon. Gentleman has raised today—that of the duty work allocation methods. The Law Society has described the current approach to slot allocation as inefficient. In its response to the consultation, it described the incentive that firms have to employ more and more duty solicitors to gain more slots, even though the total size of the market is declining. I am sure that the hon. Gentleman recognises that that is not a sustainable approach. The Law Society has also highlighted a practice that it calls “ghost solicitors”, which refers to solicitors who have minimal links to a firm receiving a payment that is neither a salary nor linked to work done for the firm.

The Law Society has called for a new method that no longer allocates work to firms on the basis of the number of duty solicitors employed. The Government have been working with the Law Society to explore those proposals and are considering all the other responses to the consultation. There is a real general issue here. I appreciate that most of the hon. Gentleman’s speech was about the specific things that his constituent suffered, but it is worth putting that in context. I will deal briefly with some of his individual points now, but I will also take them away and look at them further.

The hon. Gentleman said that the LSC approved Mr Majid’s application to work as a freelance duty solicitor through Knights Solicitors, and on 7 May it approved his electronic registration for a CDS12. Mr Majid did not personally make an application to the LSC to work as a freelance duty solicitor for Knights. The LSC accepts only applications from firms, and those firms are required to declare that the solicitors are employed by them. Therefore it cannot be said that the LSC approved of any specific employment arrangement between Mr Majid and Knights in May 2010.

The hon. Gentleman also said that the LSC negligently registered Mr Majid with a firm that was under investigation for fraud and withheld that information. Again, I have to be clear that the firms themselves submit their own lists of duty solicitors. The LSC simply received the application in May 2010. On the allegation of withholding information, I should be clear that this was a police investigation, so the LSC was not acting inappropriately at the time.

The hon. Gentleman also said that the LSC has behaved appallingly in the way in which it has handled the fraud and therefore gives no confidence that it is fit to discharge its public duties. It is fair to say that the LSC acted promptly on concerns that Knights breached its contractual duties, and that led to the termination of the contract. The LSC, or the LAA as it now is, is always there to act to protect taxpayers’ money.

The hon. Gentleman also made some remarks about the PHSO. Experience tells us that the Parliamentary and Health Service Ombudsman always acts robustly with organisations such as the LSC and on this occasion, it mounted a full investigation. It was completed without any further action being required. We have all been in this situation, whereby our constituents have gone to the parliamentary ombudsman and not had the result that they required. I have heard what the hon. Gentleman has had to say about the PHSO, but I can only repeat that sometimes it comes up with a result that we regard as satisfactory and sometimes it does not, but it is an entirely independent organisation. It is designed to be a court of appeal outside governmental structures, so that people can have some confidence that they are getting an independent response, and that is what it did in this particular case.

[Steve McCabe]

Is the Minister willing to have a further meeting with me to discuss some of the other aspects of this case that have not been aired today?

[Damian Green]

I suspect, and I will happily discuss this with the hon. Gentleman afterwards, that the most useful meeting he can have is with Matthew Coats, who is the chief executive of the new organisation. That might be a better way to take his case forward. If he is happy with that suggestion, I will just say that I am grateful to him for giving us the opportunity to discuss what is clearly a vital issue to his constituent and an important issue to him.