Oral Answers to Questions

Chris Leslie Excerpts

Tuesday 18th December 2012 Commons Chamber

[Damian Green]

I know that my hon. Friend has rightly campaigned hard on this subject. I am not entirely persuaded that there is such a gap in the law. If the driving is below the appropriate standard, a variety of offences are available, including causing death by careless driving while under the influence. If the driving had not been affected, it would not be right for the driver to be charged with anything more than a drink-driving offence.

[Chris Leslie (Nottingham East) (Lab/Co-op)]

Is the Minister not aware, however, that there is still a problem, in that the penalties imposed by the courts for driving without insurance are sometimes lower in cost than buying that insurance in the first place? Will the Minister take steps to address that anomaly, as too often there is a perverse incentive for young drivers in particular to avoid paying their car insurance, taking the risk that the penalty will be less than the costs involved?

Legal Aid, Sentencing and Punishment of Offenders Bill

Chris Leslie Excerpts

Wednesday 29th June 2011 Commons Chamber

[Mr Clarke]

The right hon. Gentleman is an ex-Front Bencher. I will give way to him later, but I should observe the strictures of Mr Deputy Speaker, although I enjoy debating with the right hon. Gentleman. I should move on a little further into my speech.

As the right hon. Gentleman has heard me say before, reoffending rates are a national scandal; that is why the system is failing. Half of offenders—49%—have been reconvicted, in part because the system is not tackling the underlying causes of their criminality such as drug abuse, poor mental health and inadequate skills. The consequence of that failure is new victims of crime every day. Despite improvement, victims and witnesses too often still get treated as an afterthought, not a central concern of justice. That is why we need intelligent, radical reform of the criminal justice system to protect and serve the needs of law-abiding members of society.

[Chris Leslie (Nottingham East) (Lab/Co-op)]

Will the Lord Chancellor give way?

[Mr Clarke]

I will later, but let me deal with what we are having to tackle in civil justice. The sad truth is that it, too, has serious weaknesses. Courts should be accessible and efficient, but generally turned to as a place of last resort, not a first choice. But we have a litigious society and far too many cases go down the court route unnecessarily. Last year, more than three quarters of claims in the civil system set down to proceed to trial were settled before the trial took place. Many of those cases might have been resolved earlier, with different approaches aimed at simpler dispute resolution. Ordinary citizens find the law an expensive, daunting nightmare, not a public service.

--- Later in debate ---

[Chris Leslie]

rose—

[Joan Ruddock]

rose—

[Mr Clarke]

I give way to the hon. Member for Nottingham East (Chris Leslie).

[Chris Leslie]

I am grateful to the Lord Chancellor. Many victims of crime will be shocked at his proposals to limit the freedom of judges to remand a defendant in custody. Why is he limiting and fettering the ability of judges to put those defendants on remand?

[Mr Clarke]

I was going to argue this later; I will try to avoid repeating myself. I cannot understand why people are so incensed that people who are not going to be sent to prison might not be kept in prison awaiting trial. Every year, 16,000 people are refused bail, kept in prison, convicted and immediately given bail. A quarter of all the people kept in custody are released when they come up for trial. I shall come back to the matter, although I shall try to avoid repeating the same arguments. It seems to me that unless one is trying to fill up the prisons with people, that is one of the more obvious steps we can take. If they are not going to justify imprisonment when they get to trial, it seems to me pointless to refuse them bail, except in the case of domestic violence cases, where we have agreed to make an exception because we cannot grant bail to someone who is going back to live with the alleged victim of the domestic violence.

Oral Answers to Questions

Chris Leslie Excerpts

Tuesday 15th February 2011 Commons Chamber

[Mr Djanogly]

Yes, I am indeed happy to meet my hon. Friend.

[Chris Leslie (Nottingham East) (Lab/Co-op)]

Will the Secretary of State think again about the compounding impact of the legal aid cut and Lord Justice Jackson’s proposals on victims of criminal negligence? It would be wrong for injured parties to have to fend for themselves, and if they pay for the compensation and the costs of cases, the wrongdoer will be getting away, which would be unfair.

[Mr Djanogly]

The hon. Gentleman makes it clear that Lord Justice Jackson’s proposals and our legal aid proposals are being run in conjunction. We were very concerned that they should so that practitioners would be able to compare the two—that is especially relevant in cases of clinical negligence—so we will be doing exactly that.

Legal Aid and Civil Cost Reform

Chris Leslie Excerpts

Monday 15th November 2010 Commons Chamber

[Mr Clarke]

I hope to, but I hesitate to claim that we are providing greater access to justice given that we are taking quite a few things out of the scope of legal aid assistance. However, I share my hon. Friend’s hope that we will encourage better resolution of disputes, of which there are plenty of examples. The president of the family division, Sir Nicholas Wall, has talked about how, in many family cases, long, adversarial conflict proves not to be the best way of resolving differences between parents and certainly is not in the children’s best interests. There are plenty of other areas in which I hope definite advantage in resolving disputes will come from our proposals.

[Chris Leslie (Nottingham East) (Lab/Co-op)]

Will the Justice Secretary try to estimate the impact of the proposals on the very poorest in society, particularly in our city of Nottingham? I know of welfare advice centres and citizens advice bureaux that will be in serious jeopardy of closing because of the way that the rules he has announced are skewed towards hitting the very poorest in society when it comes to welfare advice and housing. Can he assure us that he is not abandoning the very poorest in society to a desert in which they are left with no advice and completely without representation?

[Mr Clarke]

I realise the need for such services and I know that citizens advice bureaux are a particularly valuable source of advice for his constituents and mine in our area of Nottingham. I should point out, however, that not every bureau provides legal advice or gets legal aid and that bureaux have been eligible for it only since 2000, and we have moved into a situation in which some have become rather dependent on it. I can only say that I shall consider the problem. Legal aid probably never was the best way of financing such organisations and my colleagues and I will have to discuss whether some necessary measure can be introduced to ensure that wider advice is available, particularly to the most vulnerable in society. We are all agreed that the taxpayer should be involved only when people cannot reasonably be expected to pay at least a modest sum to get some advice of their own.

Oral Answers to Questions

Chris Leslie Excerpts

Tuesday 19th October 2010 Commons Chamber

[Mr Blunt]

I tend to agree with my hon. Friend. We have to get to a position in which those people who are charged with the rehabilitation of offenders have a much freer hand to deliver the interventions that will be effective for the offender who is in their care. If we over-prescribe exactly what has to be done from the centre, we will have a much less effective system. That process will be central to the rehabilitation revolution of delegating responsibility and authority for these decisions to a local level.

[Chris Leslie (Nottingham East) (Lab/Co-op)]

While I would not go as far as the Minister’s party in terms of rehabilitation for prisoners, is it not better to have resources going into rehabilitation so that we save money in the long run? When I spoke to those who work at Nottingham prison in my constituency, they were very concerned that the cuts that will be implemented tomorrow could mean that prisoners will be locked up for much longer periods with no rehabilitation services.

[Mr Blunt]

I detected a degree of contradiction in how the hon. Gentleman presented his question. He does not want to go as far as we would on the rehabilitation of offenders, but then asks us to go the distance. That is exactly what we will do. It would be wholly short-sighted to cut our capacity to deliver rehabilitation of offenders, and that is why we will enable a system that gets the whole country—including the voluntary, not-for-profit and the private sectors, as well as the existing state services—to work together to deliver effective rehabilitation of offenders and effect a step change in the delivery of what is a critical public service.

Oral Answers to Questions

Chris Leslie Excerpts

Tuesday 20th July 2010 Commons Chamber

[Mr Blunt]

I am grateful to my hon. Friend for her question. Today’s probation trusts possess the nation’s professional expertise on offender management. We want to release all our capacity—public, private and voluntary—to effect a revolution in how we provide for rehabilitation of offenders. No organisations are better placed to deliver that than today’s probation trusts. I hope that they seize this chance, which is why I have asked the Probation Association and the Probation Chiefs Association to work urgently with my officials to help shape our Green Paper proposals. I am confident about what probation trusts will be able to achieve.

[Chris Leslie (Nottingham East) (Lab/Co-op)]

I recommend the Minister deal with the point that I believe the hon. Lady was raising. In Nottinghamshire, there is certainly a strong case for a probation trust, but irrespective of whether we have a particular type of structure on offender management, do not the cuts to the prison budget—and, indeed, as we have heard today, the cuts to the probation service—show that the big society to which he referred is actually a euphemism for allowing prisoners to roam free within the community at large?

[Mr Blunt]

No, it is not. The hon. Gentleman and all his right hon. and hon. Friends are going to have to get used to the fact that we are going to do things rather differently. We are going to pay for outputs, not direct inputs or have targets or over-control our public services by instructing them precisely how to achieve their objectives. One way in which we are going to increase our capacity for offender management is, I hope, to enable probation trusts to be able to affect the involvement of the whole community—including the private, the voluntary and charitable sectors—to increase our nation’s capacity to deal with offenders and to rehabilitate them effectively.

Oral Answers to Questions

Chris Leslie Excerpts

Tuesday 15th June 2010 Commons Chamber

[Mr Kenneth Clarke]

Personally, I think that this Government are going to give a very high priority to restoring and, I trust, maintaining this company’s reputation—[Laughter.]—this country’s reputation as one of the leading advocates of the elimination of corruption in trade and in Government contracts. We shall also ensure that the Bribery Act 2010, which we supported, is properly enforced, and that we are in the forefront of the people paying regard to this matter. With respect, I do not think that the hon. Gentleman’s question bears very closely on that. I would also say to him that making allegations against people who are not Members, under cover of parliamentary privilege, should be done with great caution. He should not accuse people of corruption in the course of putting a question to me on this subject.

[Chris Leslie (Nottingham East) (Lab/Co-op)]

Will the Justice Secretary acknowledge that, when our constituents are the victims of crime, they often need support and assistance to navigate the criminal justice service? Will he take this opportunity to, at the very least, ring-fence his Department’s expenditure on services for the victims of crime?

[Mr Clarke]

The Government will give priority to victims to exactly the extent that the House would expect. It should be in the forefront of all our minds when trying to protect the country against crime that the interests of victims should be paramount. My reflection on this hour of questioning is that it is no good for the Labour party to respond to every suggestion that there might be budget constraints as though that represents a threat to an essential service. The fact is that there is no money, and that is the fault of those in the Labour party. They will not be taken seriously again until they face up to the reality of the situation to which they have largely contributed, and start producing some realistic alternative policies to challenge those being put forward by the Government.