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Legal Aid

Spending has gone up on the kind of civil help that my hon. Friend mentioned. As she knows from her own area, there have been new developments. Of course disabled people and children in families with disabled parents need to have proper access to legal aid. That is very much part of the DCA’s social exclusion agenda; we intend to ensure that such people have that access. I am told that, in the 2007 spending round, our settlement was the average of that for all the Departments. I shall come to housing in a bit more detail in a minute.