Legal Aid, Sentencing and Punishment of Offenders Bill

Debate between Ben Gummer and Elfyn Llwyd

Wednesday 2nd November 2011 Commons Chamber

[Ben Gummer]

The motivation of my right hon. and hon. Friends on the Front Bench is unimpeachable, as I have found from sitting behind them in the Public Bill Committee.

[Mr Llwyd]

First, I agree with the hon. Gentleman about that form of legislation and he makes a valid point. A couple of minutes ago, he asked why a millionaire or multi-millionaire should not pay for legal advice and assistance. In my experience, the vast majority of very wealthy people have their own lawyers and in many cases they actually carry their number with them all the time.

[Ben Gummer]

The right hon. Gentleman makes a reasonable point. However, a point of principle is involved here. I do not understand why people on low incomes in my constituency or that of the hon. Member for Kingston upon Hull East should be subsidising the legal advice of those who can pay for it at a later date should they be convicted of a crime. We can have a debate about this. All I am saying is that we should have the debate now, perhaps with a new clause, or address it in another place in a different way.

I move on to the new clause tabled by the hon. Member for Makerfield (Yvonne Fovargue). Her expertise in social welfare law is probably unparalleled in this House and I very much value what she brought to this debate. However, I would remind her—I hope that she will not take this remiss—that at the last election she stood on a manifesto promising cuts in legal aid. Although the examples that she gave were pertinent, no recommendation has come from the Opposition Front-Bench team as to the alternatives they would introduce, either to make cuts elsewhere, which would otherwise be seen in her area of advice—

Legal Aid, Sentencing and Punishment of Offenders Bill

Debate between Ben Gummer and Elfyn Llwyd

Monday 31st October 2011 Commons Chamber

[Ben Gummer]

That was one speech. On several occasions, we had three-hour speeches where points were recycled and regurgitated without use to the legislative process. It is unfortunate that the hon. Gentleman claims that I am padding things out, as I hope that I am addressing points not yet raised in this Chamber. I am going to do so briefly. I feel I should do so, as although I am happy to admit that I am not someone from a legal background and that I do not have a previous interest in this area of domestic violence, I have the experience of sitting in the Public Bill Committee and understanding the arguments put both by the Opposition and the Government in this difficult area. I speak as a layman and I hope to offer my support to points made by Members on both sides of the House.

On amendment 113, tabled by the hon. Member for Brighton, Pavilion (Caroline Lucas), we face a small issue about whether people from the European economic area are caught within this legislation. It will cover only a small handful of people, but the inevitable consequence of missing it out—if that happens—is that there will be some travesty and miscarriage of justice precisely in a case where someone falls through the gap. I hope that the Government will carefully examine that suggestion in the first half of the amendment.

I also fully support what my hon. Friend the Member for South Swindon said about undertakings. I have heard much evidence from people practising in this field who give a reasonable argument that a counter-productive eventuality of this Bill is that, if undertakings are excluded, it could end up greatly prolonging cases, and not only to the detriment of litigants: it would also affect the costs of the court. I hope that his constructive and sensible suggestions, which come with considerable experience of sitting on the bench and acting as counsel, will be taken up by the Government as the fair-minded suggestions that they are.

More broadly, we have a problem on self-reporting. I hope that hon. Members, especially Labour Members, will bear me out on this. Anyone who has contact with the family courts and who talks to family judges will know about the impact that allegations of child abuse have had in private law cases. In the opinion of many counsel and judges, in the past few years, allegations of child abuse have increasingly been made far too readily when no substance is behind the claims. It would be unfortunate if, under the new regime, allegations of domestic abuse and domestic violence were made as a precept to gain legal aid, because that would devalue the claims other people make completely legitimately. That is what is happening in the courts at the moment with allegations of child abuse. Several judges have remarked to me that so often is it claimed that one party or another has committed child abuse, it is beginning to numb the senses of the judges hearing those cases. It would be wrong if a similar situation were to arise with this new regime. The Government must therefore phrase the definition of domestic violence very carefully.

I hope that the Government have heard the concerns of Opposition and Government Members, such as those of my hon. Friend the Member for South Swindon, those that my hon. Friend the Member for Broxtowe has voiced on several occasions, and those raised today by my hon. Friend the Member for Maidstone and The Weald (Mrs Grant). I can hear from the way in which the Minister has been replying that he understands that some sort of uniformity would be desirable across government and that some recognition of the problems of encapsulating a definition within the Bill will be made here or in another place.

The Opposition went into the last election saying that they would seek cuts to legal aid and that promise has been reiterated both by the Leader of the Opposition, in January, and the shadow Secretary of State, who is sitting on the Front Bench, on several occasions. However, in Committee, the shadow Minister tabled dozens of amendments, some of which were, by his own admission, contradictory and many of which were culled from the handouts given by lobbyists, which extended considerably the Committee’s deliberations when we could have been discussing the meat of the proposals as we have tried to do today. He came to the House with a new amendment having denied the Public Bill Committee the ability to consider properly many of the issues that we should have discussed.

[Mr Llwyd]

What about the fantastic announcement today of the three areas of law that are to be slid into the Bill tomorrow? We have not seen any of those proposals yet.

--- Later in debate ---

[Ben Gummer]

As ever, I am pleased by the right hon. Gentleman’s intervention because he highlights an inconsistency in the Opposition’s argument. They cannot say on the one hand that the Government are not listening and that the legislative process does not work—he said earlier that the pre-legislative system was not working—but on the other, when amendments are made, that the Government are either committing a U-turn or not listening. I do not understand how the Opposition and the right hon. Gentleman can reconcile those two statements.

[Mr Llwyd]

The hon. Gentleman was waxing lyrical about the absence of time to discuss Opposition amendments, but his party is equally to blame in that we have not even had sight of their amendments. At least the Opposition amendments were available to be seen before today; we have not even seen the amendments that are the subject of today’s announcement. That is the point I am making.

[Ben Gummer]

The right hon. Gentleman misses my point about the Public Bill Committee. There are many issues that needed to be raised that we could have fleshed out at greater length, but the Opposition tabled so many specious amendments, many of which were completely contradictory—largely in the name of the shadow Minister, not that of the hon. Member for Stretford and Urmston (Kate Green), who is shaking her head—that we did not get to the meat of some of the issues in the amendment we are debating. Had we been able to discuss sub-paragraph (10)(j) of amendment 74, which the shadow Minister has tabled, we might have been able to improve the Opposition’s amendment so that it could be acceptable to Members on both sides of the House. Instead, we have an amendment that was tabled a couple of days ago with aspects that clearly would not hold up to further legislative scrutiny. It is a pity that we did not have that discussion in Committee instead of discussing a series of amendments, some of which I doubt the shadow Minister had even read before he started speaking to them.

Putting all that aside, a principal issue for me is that many of the amendments tabled by the shadow Minister in Committee would have committed his party to spending increases costing £245 million, but whenever I or other members asked whether the Opposition had any alternative spending plans, they told us to look at the Law Society’s plans. Unfortunately, the Law Society has had to revise its plans, which were found wanting.