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Legal Aid

With permission, Sir Nicholas. I am most grateful to hon. Members for all their contributions to our debate. I shall try to deal with them in turn and quickly, though I am not sure that I shall get through them all. I shall deal first with the point raised by my hon. Friend the Member for Newcastle upon Tyne, Central (Jim Cousins). If a lawyer takes on a case before the means test has been determined, he is entitled to be paid to represent that person. That is called early cover; it entitles the lawyer to be paid for representing someone prior to the decision. If the decision on means is an adverse one, the lawyer will get that money; if the decision is positive, the lawyer will get the full fee. Lawyers have a guaranteed payment for early cover. I shall not go into detail about the minutiae of the means test. Under the Tories, people had to produce 13 pay slips in court. We now have a hot link to the Department for Work and Pensions, which is in use a good deal of the time. When solicitors co-operate it works quite well, and it has dealt with more than 120,000 applications. I have a meeting every week at which I receive feedback, and take-up is improving all the time. In the major conurbations, where there is proper competition among solicitors, and in not a few backwoods places, it is working well. The hon. Member for North-West Norfolk (Mr. Bellingham) says that the fees for lawyers have not gone up—however, their income has. I cited an example in my opening speech; rather than repeat it, I refer the hon. Gentleman to Hansard. We have new legislation and an increasing number of offences. I support many of them—including those under the Domestic Violence, Crime and Victims Act 2004 and the Sexual Offences Act 2003—and they are all absolutely desirable. Plenty of research shows that such legislation is not the main cost driver. I refer the hon. Gentleman to Cape and Moorhead; I also mentioned them during a previous Adjournment debate at which he and the hon. Member for Enfield, Southgate (Mr. Burrowes) were present. I am sorry to hear that the hon. Member for Isle of Wight (Mr. Turner) is indisposed. I do not know much about the situation on the island. I happily invite the hon. Gentleman to write to me about the particular problems there. Niche suppliers, small suppliers and black and minority ethnic suppliers should have absolutely no difficulty. If a major supplier wants to bid for large number of cases, there is no reason why they should not; they have specialists of all kinds at their disposal. The public defender service has been cited. Its current accounts show that it is pretty competitive. It has a future. It is as independent as private solicitors, if not more so, in respect of the advice that it gives in police stations. There has been talk of the declining number of practitioners in civil cases. There has been some decline in the number; but as I said earlier, the amount of advice given has risen by about 20 per cent., which shows that, although there are fewer practitioners doing the work, those involved are giving much better value for money. We should remember that they are doing it on fixed fees. There is nothing wrong, therefore, with fixed fees. I attended the Immigration Law Practitioners’ Association annual general meeting, and the association will have some input when we reconsider the fees. I do not rise to the bait of being called unrealistic. I know that I am personally well grounded; I also know how much time I spend going around to talk to not-for-profit practitioners in meetings and privately; and, of course, I am close to all of those in my constituency. Realism is not a characteristic that I lack. I accept that a number of virtuous organisations have concerns; they have, of course, been driven by the Law Society, which has told them that solicitors are likely to withdraw from the kind of work in which they need their help. They will have taken that on trust. I see no more than that in what they say. I hope that they will read the report of our debate and that they understand that they need not worry like that. I say again what I have said in many different ways throughout the debate: that campaign started before the document that we are debating came out, and it was based on fees that are no longer applicable. Mental health law will be reconsidered, but I must tell the hon. Member for North-West Norfolk and other hon. Members who referred mental health that about a half of mental health work is now done by mental health lawyers who chose to do it on a fixed-fee basis. They clearly find it profitable and are able to deal with the most vulnerable and difficult people. They are obviously able to run satisfactory businesses. They were not compelled to do it; they volunteered to do exactly that. Forgive me for not being able to pin this point down precisely, but there was talk of the number of asylum lawyers falling. The number of asylum seekers has fallen far faster than the supply of lawyers, and there is still a good core of asylum practitioners. We are confident that they are improving. I was sorry to the hear about the experience of my hon. Friend the Member for Islington, North (Jeremy Corbyn). The general sense is that those who were incompetent have now left the business, and that it is time to start devolving more discretion on payments to those who are left. There is a separate system for that, but it is not directly part of our debate. I hope that I have alleviated some of my hon. Friend’s concerns.