Laura Smith
Main Page: Laura Smith (Labour - Crewe and Nantwich)Department Debates - View all Laura Smith's debates with the Ministry of Justice
(6 years, 5 months ago)
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Laura Smith (Crewe and Nantwich) (Lab)
It is an honour to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Robertson.
Today’s debate cuts right to the heart of what we mean by justice. Legal aid has been a crucial instrument in ensuring that equal access to justice is attainable. After all, if access to justice is not equal, can we call it justice at all? My surgeries, like those of my hon. Friend the Member for Westminster North (Ms Buck), are full of people seeking legal advice. Unlike many hon. Members here today, I do not have a legal background.
The exact meaning of justice may be contested, but it should be quite clear to us all that a society that allows for adequate legal representation for those who can afford it while denying the same opportunities for those who cannot is not a just society. As we have heard, the Law Society has reported on the impact of the Legal Aid, Sentencing and Punishment of Offenders Act 2012. Its findings are stark and paint a picture of a Government prioritising savings for the Exchequer over basic legal rights for our citizens. It makes 25 recommendations to improve the provision of legal advice and representation. It will be interesting to see whether this Government will actually implement the recommendations of one of our foremost legal organisations.
The 2012 Act has significantly reduced the number of areas of law in which legal aid applies, while at the same time tightening the criteria for qualification. Among the findings of the Law Society report is one that
“Large numbers of people, including children and those on low incomes, are now excluded from whole areas of free or subsidised legal advice”.
It describes changes to means testing as “counter-intuitive”, and even where people qualify for legal aid, they often struggle to access it due to inadequate provision of services, resulting in “legal aid deserts”.
Reductions in central Government funds have forced many high street legal aid firms and third sector providers to go under. The increase in legal aid deserts has resulted in many people who qualify for legal aid not being able to access it. Almost a third of the legal aid areas in England and Wales have one or no legal aid housing advice providers. Neither Shropshire nor Suffolk has a housing legal aid advice provider. Children, people with mental health issues and people with low levels of literacy and numeracy are now excluded as a result of changes to legal aid provision.
The Joint Committee on Human Rights condemned the lack of access to justice for children back in 2015 and called on the Government to correct that astonishing situation. Those calls were not heeded. The Act prevents the maximum income cap for legal aid qualification from increasing with inflation, while capital eligibility rules mean there are many benefit claimants who do not qualify for legal aid. The Justice Committee has argued that a lack of sufficient advertising of the mandatory telephone gateway has resulted in its underuse, although it is intended to be the initial point of contact for legal advice on debt, special educational needs and discrimination law.
At every turn the Government have sought to cut public services, but equal access to justice must be one of the fundamental tenets of a healthy democracy. That the Government so wilfully undermine that principle tells us all we need to know about their priorities: not ensuring fairness, not ensuring the preservation of basic rights and not ensuring a good society—social security for the rich, economic insecurity for the rest. Without legal representation being available to all, we no longer have a system of justice, but a system of privilege.