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Legal Aid

There will be graduated fees in child cases to represent the various stages of such cases. Again, the budget will not be any different from what it is now; it will simply be a matter of ensuring that the graduations are appropriate proxies for the complexities of individual cases, and that is what is being worked on. There may always be an imbalance between what somebody is paid as a privately instructed lawyer and what somebody is paid on legal aid, but I am afraid that that has ever been thus. There is no reason to think that what is happening will make it worse. Indeed, if we are right and bidding will lead to better profitability, it could improve things. Productivity has increased by 19 per cent. in the not-for-profit sector so far this year—and this year is not over yet—building on productivity increases in the previous two years. By spreading best practice the Legal Services Commission and the Advice Services Alliance, which represents not-for-profit suppliers and is hugely helpful in this context, will encourage all providers to take on a full range of cases of varying levels of complexity, which will make the fees sustainable for all the relevant providers. The fees in question are not those that were proposed at the time of Carter. It is imperative that people take on the changes that we have made, having listened to the consultation process, and let their minds be at rest. We have delayed the introduction of fixed fees for civil work until October to allow for those productivity increases to continue and to allow time for the not-for-profit sector to adjust to the new regime. Very complex cases taken by solicitors or the not-for-profit sector in the civil sphere, which will take three times as many hours as the ordinary fixed fee represents, will come out of the fixed fee system entirely, to be paid for by the hour. Those are the exceptional cases which, I think, were wrongly included in the quoted usual costs of cases, as I mentioned earlier. Something that is very complex will be dealt with completely outside the system and be supervised by the Legal Services Commission on an hour-by-hour basis.