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Legal Aid

The point that I was trying to make is that the lobby is not composed of fat cats on huge salaries who are trying to defend a privileged position. The lobby is being conducted on behalf of our constituents the length and breadth of the land, who come to legal advisers with an individual crisis or trouble, or with a set of troubles. As the hon. Member for Meirionnydd Nant Conwy (Mr. Llwyd) rightly said, those people have been rewarded in one case five years ago with an increase of 2 per cent., and in the other case three years ago with an increase of 4 per cent. They are not people who have been coining it in at the expense of the public service. I want to wrap what I say in the point that the Minister says is not properly addressed to her but that is properly addressed to the Government, because it is about the degree of commitment that the Government have shown to the legal aid service in this country. I checked the figures and they are as follow. Twenty years ago, in 1987-88, the expenditure on legal aid in 2005-06 prices was £836 million. Ten years ago, it was £2.016 billion—again, that is in 2005-06 prices. In 2005-06—the last year for which figures are available—it was £2.1 billion. The introduction to the Minister’s own report in November made the point that in the period between Labour coming to office and now, the legal aid budget has increased from £1.5 billion to £2 billion. I accept that. It is an increase, as the Minister can work out, of 27.2 per cent. between the comparable dates. The health service has had a 100 per cent. increase in its budget over that period. Public order and safety has had a 77 per cent. increase. Education and training has had an 80 per cent. increase. Total Government expenditure on public services has increased by nearly 60 per cent. The hon. Member for Beaconsfield (Mr. Grieve) was absolutely correct. In the divvying up of the public expenditure cake, the money going to the third pillar of the welfare state—legal services—has creased by significantly less than expenditure on education and health. If our aim is to look after people and give them the right to education, to health care and to the legal service, we need to ensure that we put the case for a greater envelope of expenditure on legal aid, because if we do not do that, the money will not be found. I accept that. We are coming up to a comprehensive spending review, so I am putting the case—I heard it put by Conservative Members and I heard it put in other terms by Labour Members—that, in the next review, the legal aid budget needs to be increased significantly if it is to keep pace with the pressure on it. We have more people. We have relatively more poorer people. We have more older people. We have more new immigrant people. We have a larger number of people in our black and minority ethnic communities. The reality is that there will be more demand. I sincerely hope that the Minister understands that point. She has to work within the budget given to her but, to put it bluntly, it is not enough, which is one of the principal reasons for the present difficulty. The second reason is the simple proposition—you understand this, Sir Nicholas, as the Minister does—that most, or many, cases are unique and require uniquely specialist responses. Of course, some are multiple-issue cases, but some are not. The reality, therefore, is that the fixed-fee system, even with the transitional system, is too rigid. Different communities have different issues, just like different people have different needs. The reality is that fixed fees will offer no incentive to specialise in certain areas. The danger is that the people who are approached will do the routine work, which is easy because one can get it done quickly for the fixed fee, and they will not take on the work that is more difficult and more complex. Who suffers? Not the lawyers, but the people who come to them. I will be interested to hear the Minister’s answers to certain questions at the end of the debate. How many firms will do legal aid? The hon. Member for North-West Norfolk (Mr. Bellingham) cited the current number. I agree with him about the figure; we have both been given the same briefings. Several thousand do civil legal aid and several thousand do criminal legal aid, but their number is predicted to go down. Of itself, that may not be a bad thing, but how many solicitors will do legal aid work? What percentage of all solicitors will do legally aided work? It looks as though it will be a significantly smaller number. People have come to me and said, ““We will not be able to afford to do it. Our firm will not do this work. I’m sorry. We will opt out. We will go private. We will make more money. It just won’t be worth it.”” For me, that is not the way the legal service should be going. What will the average pay be of the solicitor who opts to do either all or some legal aid work? The answer is that it will be relatively less than that of those who go only into the private sector. What incentive is that to the graduate who wants to do their social service as a lawyer? The answer is that it is not an incentive, because they will feel the pressure, not only in London, where property prices are high, but in other places, to do something else. They will say that they will not be able to choose to continue to do legal aid work, and that is sad and unacceptable. I ask the Minister, when she reflects on these matters, to examine what will have happened to the pay of the local teacher and the local general practitioner relative to the pay of the legal aid solicitor since Labour came to power. The answer is that the legal aid solicitor will have done worst of those three.