Oral Answers to Questions

Fleur Anderson Excerpts

Tuesday 14th July 2020 Commons Chamber

[Robert Buckland]

I pay tribute to my hon. Friend for his assiduous representation of the many hundreds of prison officers in his constituency, and he is right to draw my attention to those concerns. I repeat the assurance that we are reviewing that policy. I want to get it right; I want whistleblowing to be a safe and meaningful exercise for all staff, and I am happy to undertake that review, which will be completed later in the year.

[Fleur Anderson (Putney) (Lab)]

The new Civil Legal Aid (Remuneration) (Amendment) (Coronavirus) Regulations 2020, which came into force on 8 June, set a standard fixed fee that will make legally aided complex asylum and immigration work financially unviable. Will the Secretary of State commit urgently to assessing the impact of that fixed fee and to funding a system that pays a fair wage to legal aid lawyers, to ensure that access to justice is not denied to some of the most disadvantaged people in our communities?

[Robert Buckland]

The hon. Lady will be glad to know that I have already committed to the second stage of the consultation to do that, to reflect fully the nature of the work undertaken by immigration practitioners. Our aim in the first stage was to quickly bring forward increases to reflect important work on skeleton arguments —it was always a first stage. I have made that commitment and we are going to get on with the consultation, as we always planned.