Mick Whitley
Main Page: Mick Whitley (Labour - Birkenhead) Legal Aid: North-West
Mick Whitley Excerpts(2 years, 2 months ago)
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Mick Whitley (Birkenhead) (Lab)
It is a pleasure to serve under your chairship, Ms Fovargue, and I congratulate my good and hon. Friend the Member for Salford and Eccles (Rebecca Long Bailey) on having secured this important debate. My learned friends will know better than anyone that there is no greater honour for a practitioner of law than to stand up for the rights of the poor and innocent, but today, there is simply no incentive for lawyers or their firms to engage in legal aid work. Over the past 30 years, fees for civil legal aid work have more than halved in real terms, while fees for criminal aid have similarly fallen far behind inflation.
The consequences have been devastating. Countless firms providing legal aid have folded, while the number of criminal aid providers has fallen by a fifth in Merseyside in just the past 10 years. Fewer and fewer trained solicitors are deciding to enter this important field, meaning that the average age of a criminal duty solicitor working in the north-west today is now 51. Based on current trends, in just a few years’ time there will be no legal aid provision whatsoever in some parts of our region. No corner of the UK has been worse affected by the plummeting numbers of legal aid practitioners than the north-west, and it sounds like my constituency of Birkenhead is being hit hardest of all.
In our region alone there are 46,000 cases waiting to be heard by the courts, leaving thousands of victims, witnesses and perpetrators of crime still waiting for justice to be done. It is the poorest who are bearing the brunt: as a representative of some of the most deprived communities in the UK, I am inundated every single day by people seeking support on complex housing, debt and welfare cases. My constituents have the right to expect quality legal advice, but the sad reality is that providers of such advice have become few and far between. Indeed, the legal aid directory now lists just seven organisations with contracts to offer welfare benefit services in the north-west—one for every million people. In the midst of the spiralling cost of living crisis, with so many millions of people dependent on a cruel and often opaque benefits system just to get by, that is an astonishing failure on the part of this Government.
What are the Government doing to address this unfolding catastrophe? Ministers talk about the need to be tough on crime, but that means nothing to the countless victims in my constituency who are still waiting for their day in court. Instead of taking the action that is so badly needed to tackle the historic backlog in our courts, Ministers are spending their time attempting to erect even more barriers to justice with the Judicial Review and Courts Bill, while their colleagues push ahead with the undemocratic attempt to criminalise peaceful protest; and all the while, more cases pile up on the docket.
The scale of the crisis facing our legal system is unprecedented, but it is not too late for the Government to start putting things right. After 12 long years of allowing the pleas of the legal profession to fall on deaf ears, Ministers must now urgently implement the 15% increase in criminal legal aid fees recommended by the Bellamy review and outline a long-term plan to create a more sustainable sector.