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Legal Aid

I am not sure that the Minister was at a court last week, as I was at Enfield magistrates court, when that point was made to me by the Crown prosecutor, by the clerk, who bemoaned the fact that she does not have the ability to carry out a decision properly and in a timely manner, and by defence solicitors alike. That was only last week. Despite the revisions, there is still profound concern about the inability of Departments, including the Department for Work and Pensions, to deal with issues of income support and properly process statements in a timely manner. They also fail to deal with those, including self-employed people, who have difficulty in properly collating their affairs and dealing with matters in a timely manner so that a proper decision can be reached. The call went out for means-testing. Yes, we recognised that wealthy defendants in those classic tabloid cases should not receive legal aid, but also that any new system of means-testing had to work in a streamlined, effective and simple manner. The concern of practitioners and others is that the Government have not delivered on means-testing, so will they be able to deliver on the implementation of Carter? The Government have not got means-testing right and have come up with belated revisions to the system. That does not bode well. What will happen in respect of Carter? The concern is that the Government’s response to the consultation and quoted issues about fee structure has failed to have regard for the extra mile that practitioners and others go in publicly funded work. It is not just a case of receiving the fee. As many have said, practitioners have an altruistic motivation to provide a proper service to clients. The resulting added value can be seen at any court in which a place is gained for a drug addict to get rehabilitation or a residence is found for a mentally ill person. Such things are not purely reflected in the statistics. That quality, provided up and down the country, will soon be dumbed down by the processes of implementation that the Government are following through. The concern is that we will effectively have a sausage-machine approach that dumbs the system down to the extent that people will soon not have proper regard for complex cases, unqualified people will deal with much more serious cases and miscarriages of justice will result. When, years down the line, we come to discuss the future of legal aid, the concern is that the system will have gone down to the lowest common denominator: not efficiency, but cost. That would be to the detriment of all, not least the vulnerable of our society.