---

Carter Review (Legal Aid)

I am glad to see you in the Chair, Mr. Martlew, and I am grateful for your assistance already in trying to ensure that we can accommodate those who are very interested in the debate. Indeed, I wish that your authority extended to allowing us to change places with the main Chamber, because given the number of hon. Members who want to take part and the wider interest, there might be more interest in this debate than in what is going on in the main Chamber, but alas the Standing Orders do not give you the power to do that. I welcome the Minister to her new post and congratulate her on her appointment. I look forward to hearing from her later. The debate is on a report that the Select Committee on Constitutional Affairs produced on the Carter review of legal aid. That process—that report—produced more evidence than any other report on which the Committee has worked. Vast quantities of evidence were submitted, which were of great value to us. I am particularly grateful to the staff of the Committee and its advisers for the work that they put into analysing the very large quantity of evidence and dealing with the many responses that we received. The Government issued their response to our report on 22 June, and I shall refer to that as the debate continues. Legal aid guarantees access to justice and is a fundamental human right. Criminal legal aid is enshrined in article 6 of the European convention on human rights, which is given domestic effect by the Human Rights Act 1998. Scottish cases that have gone to the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council have shown that funding arrangements and fee structures for legal aid providers have serious human rights implications and, if insufficient, violate the right to a fair trial, so let no one be in any doubt about the importance of what we are discussing. Legal aid is a powerful tool to fight social exclusion: it is focused on the financially weakest and most vulnerable members of society. In the light of the Prime Minister’s recent welcome announcement of his desire to strengthen accountability in local government and public services, it is worth remembering that legal aid can be a powerful vehicle for holding local authorities to account. In the areas of housing, welfare benefit or community care law, for example, it is decisions of local and other public authorities that are often in dispute, and legal aid granted to individuals allows them to challenge those decisions by means of court action if necessary. That, in turn, sets standards for the future conduct of public services. We can be proud of the legal aid system in England and Wales, whereby we spend more than any other democratic country per capita on publicly funded legal advice and assistance for those in need.