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Revised Funding Code

My Lords, I shall be brief, following the expertise of the noble Earl. This is one of those occasions when I come near to despair at the way in which we do our sums. We well know the cost to the criminal justice system of the failure of early interventions. I would even suggest that there is a substantial cost to the legal aid system in the long term in the failure to get assessments right at this early point. It seems that we are confronted yet again with an inadequacy in the way in which we calculate costs and savings. If we could only look rather further ahead than we do, we might find that the funding that is being withdrawn would have been a very good investment even in the narrow area of legal aid, let alone in the human area of the care of children.