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Legal Aid

If my hon. Friend writes to me, I shall try to answer the point that he was trying to make. In family and civil law, it is our intention in the longer term to increase the proportion of overall spending from the legal aid budget. There are no cuts to be made to those budgets. This year civil and family legal aid expenditure will be more than 20 per cent. higher than it was two years ago. More than 700,000 people have been given legal help in the past year—50,000 more than we expected and more than ever since the community legal service began in 2000. Contrary to claims about advice deserts, face-to-face advice increased by 13 per cent. on the previous year and advice by telephone from Community Legal Service Direct nearly trebled—research showed that that was done to great satisfaction, too, in only its second year of service. This year we intend to increase acts of assistance by a further 5 per cent., or another 50,000. It is to the great credit of suppliers that that can be done, but it also happens because we ensure that the services are initiated and resourced. Having painted a growing picture of the supply in civil cases, I want to consider family cases. Profit costs in care proceedings have increased from £109 million in 2004-05 to £129 million in 2005-06—an increase of 10.8 per cent. per certificate issued. If we consider civil and family cases together in that context, we see that the climate is hardly one in which we would expect huge numbers of civil or family practitioners to go out of business. That nostrum has been given much ventilation over the summer, but it comes from the dark ages to suggest that improving efficiency, as we intend to do, will undermine quality or impede the personal touch. Efficiency undermines neither. The taxpayer requires all three. The fees proposed for family work caused concern back in July. We realised quickly that they were not sufficiently sensitive and we agreed to take them back. They need change before they are right for that field and we have engaged with the professions in negotiating the changes. In the case of civil help, solicitors are already paid a fixed fee per case for the help that they give. Such tailored fixed fees are based on firms’ average claims and were introduced in 2003-04 as a stepping stone to a single fixed fee system for all suppliers. However, not-for-profit advice agencies, such as citizens advice bureaux, are paid on a contract to provide hours of work. We cannot justify using a different basis to pay for the same work, according to who supplies it; the right way to pay for both is fixed fees. The tailored fixed fee system, which has helped to give rise to the increased productivity that I mentioned, has shown that fixed fees work for civil help. The fees proposed in the consultation document in July, which were based on solicitors’ pay rates, also caused concern. We listened carefully to the concerns of the not-for-profit sector, whose representatives told me that they see different clients from solicitors. They told me that they see more vulnerable people, who have multiple difficulties, who often have mental health issues and who often do not have English as their first language. However, solicitors who do such work disagree that they do not see equally vulnerable people with equal difficulties. We have therefore based the fixed fees on data from both sides—the not-for-profit sector and solicitors—to try to get over the problem. Average not-for-profit costs are significantly higher than solicitors’ costs for debt, slightly higher for welfare benefits cases and lower in other categories, such as housing, so the fees to be set for civil advice have changed quite markedly since July. The fixed fee for a debt case is £70 a case higher than it was in July and the fee for a welfare benefits case is £20 a case higher than it was in July. Despite the assertion that not-for-profit agencies see more difficult and more complex cases, their costs were about the same as solicitors’ in other categories. Most of the fees have therefore stayed roughly the same, even though we have incorporated data from not-for-profit providers.