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Legal Aid

My hon. Friend is entirely right, but there is no perfect picture at present. Law centres and citizens advice bureaux do not fit the model of providing advice across the range of social welfare law. Most citizens advice bureaux offer one or two—three at the most—types of social welfare advice. We need to ensure that the networks are established. An interesting fairly recent piece of research was carried out by Richard Moorhead, who is an esteemed academic. He considered the way in which advice was delivered in the not-for-profit sector as well as by solicitors. He found that half of the people in his sample who had gone to get advice on civil law, and were interviewed by his researchers a month later, disclosed that they had another problem, or more than one, that they had not been able to disclose to their original adviser. That is a condemnation of the current approach. That research and previous research points towards the fact that people who get information and are empowered to deal with their own problems do well, as do people who get advice, while the people who do worst are those who look for advice but do not get it. We are not delivering across the board, and we must encourage such delivery. The proposals will help.