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Criminal Justice and Immigration Bill

I, too, support the amendment, with all the fervour that I can command. The case proves itself over and over again. Legal aid is a dark cloud that hovers on the horizon of justice all too often. This has a lot to do with the fact that those funds comes from a small department that has a limited budget and with the fact that comparatively small increases year by year reflect themselves in substantial percentages. I have been aware of that for many decades, and it is one of the great impediments to the development of justice in our land. I have no doubt that there is a massive moral obligation and, I believe, a convention obligation on the Government, with regard to the rights of the child. It is not sufficient to say that the child’s situation must somehow or other contract itself into a situation that justice demands. It should be the other way round: in other words, the child has a right to representation unless the situation contracts itself out of the consideration of justice. For those reasons, I urge the Government to reconsider the position. Not only is it a matter of justice, it is a matter of considerable assistance as far as the court itself is concerned. More time and money are lost by judges and magistrates going out of their way to satisfy themselves that they have covered every possible situation in relation to an unrepresented defendant than in the opposite case. That has been my experience.