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Carter Review (Legal Aid)

My hon. Friend makes an assumption; I shall listen carefully to her speech to see if she provides evidence with which to back it up. If the small number of legal aid lawyers earning hundreds of thousands of pounds would not wish to carry out that work if their maximum remuneration was £100,000 or less, plenty of other legal aid lawyers would be prepared to do it, and many of them would be black or Asian. I cannot accept that a public service should pay Rolls-Royce prices. My hon. Friend the Minister, in a previous job, ran the Motability car service for disabled people, which buys decent, safe, appropriate, sensible and necessary cars for disabled people, but nobody would suggest for one minute that such a service, paid for out of the public purse, through disability living allowance, should provide Rolls-Royces. If it did and, therefore, left less money in the budget to provide ordinary, necessary and serviceable cars to other disabled people, it would be malfunctioning. To make that comparison, I believe that the legal aid budget is malfunctioning.