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Carter Review (Legal Aid)

The right hon. Gentleman was actively involved in the Committee work on the report, and neither he nor I was surprised. I suppose that it is not really surprising that if lawyers believe that the Government have got something seriously wrong, they are the first people to make use of the mechanisms with which they are familiar, but the right hon. Gentleman is right to say that the Government should take the opportunity to reflect on the problems that have been revealed, and, for various reasons, some of which I shall come to, this is an opportunity to reflect and think again about at least some aspects of the system. The system has come under severe strain in the past decade. Expenditure, mainly in the areas of Crown court defence cases and child care proceedings, has rocketed and appears to be still on the increase. We now have a legal aid budget of more than £2 billion. No one would disagree with the suggestion that the legal aid system needs some reform, and the Government’s proposals, published on the basis of Lord Carter’s review, are pretty well known. They involve a comprehensive move to remuneration of legal aid lawyers per case—rather than by the hour—at a price set by the market on the basis of competitive tendering for legal aid contracts by providers. However, until that best value tendering is rolled out nationally after October 2008, new fixed and graduated fees set by the Legal Services Commission will apply to publicly funded legal advice. The planned new fee schemes would lead to significant reductions in fee levels for legal aid practitioners, especially in urban areas and for criminal legal aid. The Constitutional Affairs Committee undertook a thorough inquiry into the proposals and the subsequent modifications to them made by the then Department for Constitutional Affairs and the LSC.