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Legal Aid

I thank the Minister for that. I was going to say the reforms will cut the criminal budget. I have seen no analysis of the economic impact on mixed firms and the consequences for civil provision of making the cuts in the criminal budget. Secondly, although the reforms to the civil and family side are claimed to be cost-neutral, it seems to me that massive budget cuts will be caused by the switch to national averages, particularly in areas with a high incidence of deprivation, foreign-language-speaking communities or the rest. Thirdly, the Government have said that even if the Department for Constitutional Affairs had a much larger legal aid budget, they would still implement the reforms. There is always a case for reviewing the system and for reform, but if the Minister goes down the road that she is following, we will probably lose a huge amount of talent in the system. Those people will not then return and we will not recruit the people we need to replace them. The danger is that we will have broken the back of a system that has been built up over 20 or 30 years simply because we have a more complex society with more complex legislation and more complex regulation, and because the lawyers are more needed by the poor than ever before. We are making a case for the poor and the disadvantaged. There needs to be a bigger legal aid budget and a rethink of the system. I hope that the Minister listens, if not to us, at least to the Select Committee when it reports. I hope that at the end of the process we will have a second revised response to Carter’s proposals. Carter may have started the Government in the direction that they want to travel, but I hope that they will change direction, because we will get a much fairer system if they do.