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Legal Aid

I declare my interest in staying out of the hands of lawyers, and nothing that I have heard this afternoon does anything to dissuade me from that. I welcome the flexibility that my hon. and learned Friend the Minister has given about fixed fees in some of the key areas of civil law work. She will acknowledge in the light of the debate that that is something about which Parliament will have to be kept informed. The worries expressed by my hon. Friend the Member for Regent's Park and Kensington, North (Ms Buck), among others, are something that we all share. Parliament will have to be kept informed, because of the impact on the political process as we experience it as Members. I welcome, too, the fact that the Minister has said that there is to be some reconsideration of police station boundaries in the area of criminal work. Lord Carter, in his wisdom, put North and South Shields together. One cannot get from North Shields to South Shields without using a ferry, which is not terribly convenient for the courts involved. Again, Parliament will have to be kept informed about those matters because they are no longer points of obscure detail but are fundamental to the workings of our legal system. I share with my hon. Friend the Member for Tooting (Mr. Khan) a great regret that the area where the abuses are found—in the high-cost cases—is the last end of the legal food chain that the Government have chosen to clean out. The first are not the last in the way that our Lord intended. Those high cost cases should have been the first area for investigation, not the last. I urge my hon. and learned Friend the Minister to consider the harshness of the means tests that are now being applied in legal aid. They will have perverse effects. There will be more litigants in person, which will have an impact on the courts system. More people might well plead guilty to minor offences without considering the lifelong impact that such a plea might have on them, and far more cases might reach the Crown court than would otherwise have been the case because of the differences in means-testing between the two systems. It is too early to tell whether that will happen, but it well might and I hope that my hon. and learned Friend will keep an eye on it. I welcome my hon. and learned Friend’s intervention in the working of means-testing in the magistrates courts, which she made just before Christmas. I think that she headed off what could have been a substantial crisis in the working of our court system. None the less, that does not give confidence in some of the other assurances that she has given us. We all appreciate that she tried to head off some of the complexities of means-testing and she was right to refer to it in the debate, but those problems should not have arisen. Can she assure us that the merits test and the means test, both of which have to be satisfied, will be able to be dealt with instantly by someone at the court so that people will know that they will be represented and so that the people who represent them will know that they will be paid? That is fundamental. Just before Christmas, we were sliding into a position where that was not the case. We cannot run a court system in such circumstances. Will the Minister assure us, too, that some of the complications about both parties signing up to the means-test form in a reasonable period will be dealt with? Will some of the problems of the self-employed in finding where they stand in the means-testing system be dealt with? It is no earthly good our saying that we are in favour of flexible labour markets and then doing over the people involved when they happen to appear in the courts. Will she also assure us that the problem that she had in mind just before Christmas—that there would be a cascade of requests for adjournments, which would have a bad effect on the court system—will be resolved? If a fixed fee for criminal work is to be introduced, will my hon. and learned Friend assure us that the potentially perverse effect of delays by the CPS or the police will not have an impact on whether cases are taken, or how they are conducted? Finally, will she will bear in mind the potential impact on police behaviour in police stations and in court if officers know that the defending representative is working to a fixed fee? That could have a real impact on how the police decide to handle cases. I hope that my hon. and learned Friend will be able to reassure us on those matters.