Community Legal Service (Funding) (Amendment No. 2) Order 2011

Lord Beecham Excerpts

Wednesday 26th October 2011 Lords Chamber

[The Lord Bishop of Ripon and Leeds]

My Lords, I am grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Bach, for raising this issue tonight and for concentrating my thoughts—like those of the noble Earl, Lord Listowel—on the welfare of children as they are treated by our legal system. We spent the whole of this afternoon talking about the treatment and rights of children. I look forward to the Government’s response and comment on the ways in which children can be particularly protected in our legal system by the way in which the distribution of fees is arranged throughout that system.

I am still puzzled by the words of the noble Lord, Lord Marks, and why it should be this area in which we look for savings. A number of noble Lords have spoken of areas, in criminal law, for example, where there could be significant savings. Why should it be this area? I think of the work, for example, of Henry Hyams, a firm of solicitors in Leeds which takes some 2,000 cases a year from the most deprived areas of Leeds. They tell me that almost all of those cases involve the welfare of children.

That takes us to the effect of these cuts on those clinicians who provide reports to assist the courts in making determinations about the safeguarding of children—professionals who provide evidence of injury and of abuse and who are often key to the welfare of children. We have improved immensely our understanding of childcare in our society, and much of that has been due to the diligence of such professionals. We are all made very aware when a mistake is made by one of those professionals; we forget the thousands of cases when accurate decisions are taken about children’s welfare and their future. The debate that we had all afternoon and this debate come together in looking at the well-being—again—of children, and of their place in our society.

Clergy in pastoral work are often aware of the time spent both by those clinicians and by lawyers with their clients, seeking the best way forward for children and family life, often in work that is undertaken quite outside the fee system. We claim to be a society that puts the family first; social welfare law is an important part of enabling us to do that.

The noble Lord, Lord Marks, spoke of the way in which he hoped that, if there were gaps in our provision, they would be able to be filled again as the economic situation becomes better. But the most important part of our response to the difficulties in which we find ourselves is that those who are most deprived in our society should be those whom we seek to protect from the cuts being made. The Government and many local authorities seek to do that, yet in this particular instance those cuts are bearing at their hardest on those least able to bear the brunt of them.

[Lord Beecham]

My Lords, I have three categories of interest to declare. The first is professional but, unlike a number of noble Lords who have spoken, not as a member of the Bar and still less as a most distinguished judge but as a mere solicitor and now as an unpaid consultant in the firm of which I was senior partner for some 30 years. The second is a political interest. As my noble friend will recall, it was a resolution that I was responsible for that went to the Labour Party conference some three years ago, which was somewhat critical—and rightly so—of the then Government’s policies on legal aid. That led to the establishment of the committee chaired by my noble friend Lord Bach, on which he was gracious enough to invite me to participate. The third is a personal one, because the noble Baroness, Lady Deech, and I graduated at the same time all of 46 years ago from the school of jurisprudence at Oxford.

This order, coming as it does shortly before the Legal Aid, Sentencing and Punishment of Offenders Bill reaches your Lordships' House, is something of a tawdry harbinger of what is very likely to be a prolonged and hard winter for access to justice. It is interesting that the young legal aid lawyers, in the briefing note that they have circulated, drew attention to the fact that the consultation that the Government entered into on their proposals to reduce these fees was very limited. They consulted only the Law Society and the Bar Council; there was no consultation with other stakeholders, such as law centres, community groups or citizens advice bureaux, or indeed any client interests. This does not seem to represent the “no decision about me without me” process, which was allegedly followed in terms of the health service.

--- Later in debate ---

The noble Lord, Lord Beecham, talked about the supply side being likely to diminish and I shall try to cover that in a moment. It is certainly not right to say that we did not consult widely. The reforms were subject to full public consultation, which ran from 15 November 2010 to 14 February 2011 and elicited over 5,000 responses.

[Lord Beecham]

The lack of consultation to which I referred and on which I quoted the legal aid lawyers was in relation to this fees order, not the Green Paper.

[Lord McNally]

These were all foreshadowed in the Green Paper. The noble Lord, Lord Newton, is not a happy bunny but, as I said to the noble Lord, Lord Beecham, if we were not willing to take tough decisions, there would be a lot more unhappy bunnies around because we would be paying interest rates of two, three or four times what we are paying now, which would result in far greater cuts in public expenditure and services. The fact that our Government are not making headlines in relation to the economic situation in which they find themselves is because we had the courage to take tough decisions early. I have no doubt that when we ask colleagues and the Opposition to face up to that fact, we will always have the problem that these are tough decisions; we have never resiled from that.