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Criminal Defence Service (Representation Orders and Consequential Amendments) Regulations 2006

I, too, thank the noble Baroness for her exposition of these three sets of regulations relating to the Criminal Defence Service. When the state-funded Criminal Defence Service was started up some years ago, I opposed it and the passage of the legislation through the House. I subsequently discovered that it was in fact providing a spirited and independent service in the few centres where it had been set up—in Birmingham, Liverpool, Cheltenham and elsewhere. I was very impressed with the work it was doing, not least because I was instructed by it to appear in the divisional court in certain cases, where I thought a very independent line was being taken. I have since addressed its annual conference and a quote from me appears in its annual report. So I hope the noble Baroness appreciates my point of view. In my early years as a solicitor, I spent my time in the magistrates’ court learning my trade. It did not pay in the early 1960s and it certainly does not pay now. One reason why I moved from one side of the profession to the other was that I was the one partner in the firm who was not making any money. I got fed up with my brother and others making a lot of money, so I decided that it was time to go. One of the problems arising here has been touched upon by the noble Lord, Lord Kingsland—the coming together of this approach in these orders with the Carter report. The report, for the first time, seems to address the very important issue of how you build into the legal aid system incentives to do cases quickly and efficiently. One of the problems causing the expenditure to which the noble Lord, Lord Kingsland, referred—50 per cent of legal aid expenditure goes on 1 per cent of cases—is the culture whereby a case can run on and on, with various applications being made, some of little worth, because the way in which people were paid encouraged time-wasting. That has been addressed by the Carter report, but I do not think that these orders deal with that sort of problem. One difficulty is in the eligibility rules: £20,740 is not a very high income. If you earn more than that, you get no legal aid at all. It says in the accompanying notes that only 1 per cent of those who appear in magistrates’ courts—and there are 2 million of them—earn more than £20,740 a year. I find that a very hard statistic to believe and I would like to know what the basis of it is. It seems to me that people with incomes that are barely average and those with incomes above that are frequent attenders in the magistrates’ court. The area between £11,000 and £20,000 is where the problem lies. Means-tested legal aid has been tried before and, as the noble Baroness knows, it was a failure. It cost so much to deal with the bureaucracy involved in proving income, and so on, that it did not save any money. The proposal now is that a person’s wage slip for one month will be sufficient, or their national insurance number if they are in receipt of benefits. I do not see that system lasting for very long because it is open to all sorts of abuse. I think it is likely that less legal aid will be available. That is the purpose of the order—to cut down on costs. That means that it will become even more unprofitable to do cases in the magistrates’ court than it was in my early years. What follows from that and from the Carter report is that firms simply will not undertake legal aid. Something like 2,700 firms of solicitors take legal aid cases at the moment, but I can see that figure dropping rapidly. Solicitors do not provide a public service for nothing; obviously they have to make a reasonable income out of what they do. Undoubtedly there will be deserts in the country where representation will not be readily available because a solicitor is sometimes needed at very short notice. I fear that this will be an enormous disincentive to the legal profession to be involved in legal aid work and that it will therefore lead to a lack of representation. I make this point. A defendant who is represented and whose case is put, one hopes, succinctly and well by professionals to a court saves money. A person who represents himself will go on for ever. Your Lordships will know that from the fact that the professional lawyers in this House talk at much shorter length than others.