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Legal Aid

I do not regard a budget that has increased from £1.5 billion to £2.1 billion since 1997 as a budget that has taken a hit, but I shall come to the cost in a minute, if I may. I welcome this debate. It comes in Government time, but I hope that that will give me an opportunity to put to rest some of the misapprehensions that have survived the changes that we made to the Carter proposals after the consultation. I should like to make it clear again that we accept the direction of travel of Carter, but we have changed the pace, the sequencing and so on.