Kate Green
Main Page: Kate Green (Labour - Stretford and Urmston)Department Debates - View all Kate Green's debates with the Ministry of Justice
Future of Legal Aid
Kate Green Excerpts(5 years, 6 months ago)
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Andy Slaughter
The figures speak for themselves. My hon. Friend is absolutely right. I am responding to a series of powerful interventions. Across the board, matter starts have gone down from more than 900,000 at their peak in 2010, to about 140,000 in the past year. That is a dramatic fall, but in some areas, such as welfare benefits, the decline has been even sharper.
Kate Green (Stretford and Urmston) (Lab)
I congratulate my hon. Friend on securing the debate. Does he agree that the absence of legal aid funding has driven legal aid solicitors and not-for-profit providers out of the market, which has left the door open to cowboy providers? They purport to be able to offer advice on immigration cases, for example, but that advice is poor quality, unreliable and, frankly, inaccurate, as I see repeatedly in my constituency.
Andy Slaughter
My hon. Friend raises that issue from a position of knowledge, as she used to serve on the magistrates bench. There is a deskilling of the professions because of the decline in the number of practitioners who can secure funds. Although informal and non-legal advice, such as that from McKenzie friends, can play its part, too often it is stepping in where proper professional legal advice is needed and, as my hon. Friend has said, it is too often being done by people who are, effectively, rogues.
It becomes wearing to hear Minister after Minister repeat the mantra that legal aid is an important part of our legal system and that all individuals must have access to justice, without ensuring that the resources are there to allow that to happen. That is a disconnect. Although I welcome the remit and engagement of the LASPO review, the feedback from those who have met the Department suggests that little action will follow the warm words we have heard. More specifically, this week’s Budget confirmed that the Department will continue to make hundreds of millions of pounds of cuts over the next five years, some of which will inevitably come from the legal aid budget. The Minister must realise that that is unsustainable and incompatible with her stated support for legal aid.
Let me try to make it easy for the Minister to say yes. In garnering public support for this debate, More United specified three asks to put to the Government to deal with some of the worst consequences of LASPO, which were: access to early advice, access to welfare advice and simpler criteria for obtaining legal aid.
Those will not be unfamiliar requests to the Minister, but they encapsulate solutions to three major and predicted calamities of LASPO. First, cutting early advice means problems fail to get sorted while they are small and manageable, with worse consequences to the individual and the state down the line. Secondly, taking welfare advice out of scope leaves those people who need help most struggling. Thirdly, restrictive and complex eligibility criteria have become an effective way of stopping even those of very limited means getting access to what legal aid is still available.