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Tribunals, Courts and Enforcement Bill [Lords]

I absolutely agree with my right hon. Friend: the presumption should be that there should not be lawyers and legal representation, but occasionally they will be needed. Lawyers should be the exception in tribunals, rather than the rule. I want to make two more points about part 1. I mentioned one of them in an intervention. The Joint Committee on Human Rights has done us a good service, as always. It produced two relevant reports that address these matters and they make it clear that it is anomalous that immigration and asylum matters, alone, do not have a second tier of adjudication. Paragraph 6.31 of its second report of this Session states:"““We therefore share the concern of our predecessor Committee in its report on what is now the 2004 Act that the differential access to legal remedies in creating a unique single-tier tribunal for immigrants and asylum seekers lacks objective justification in Convention””—" that is the European convention on human rights—"““terms. We do not consider that the figures provided by the Government concerning the average length of time cases are now taking compared to before the 2004 reforms amount to a justification for the differential treatment.””" The Committee says that it will return to the matter in other reports. As somebody who does some of the highest amounts of immigration work—I have seen the Home Office figures—of any of my colleagues, I have to say that there is sometimes a feeling that people in that bit of the administrative system do not get the same fairness of treatment as people get in employment law, social security law or elsewhere.