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Criminal Justice and Immigration Bill

moved Amendment No. 6: 6: Schedule 1, page 121, line 2, leave out ““include a local authority residence requirement”” and insert ““make”” The noble Earl said: Here we are, my Lords, back at legal representation for minors. The noble Lord, Lord Hunt, sent me an immensely long letter that was well drafted by the Civil Service. I had quite a lot of trouble understanding it because, as with all of these things, I accept that it was designed as much to spread paper as to spread knowledge and light. However, after a bit of digging out it appears that although we said in Committee that it would cost £800,000 to fill this gap, the situation is much worse than was originally thought. In the calendar year 2006, there were 126,000 cases of under-18s being charged. Of those, one-quarter did not apply for, or get, legal aid. As the Minister said in his letter, if all under-18s applied for legal aid, it is estimated that the additional cost to the Legal Aid Fund would be £17 million. Let us assume for the sake of argument—and I quite concede that this is an assumption off the top of my head—that half of the children who could have applied for legal aid, if they had done so or indeed if they had known about it, would have been given it. That would mean an extra £8 million, not the £800,000 that we were talking about earlier. The Government cannot say that that would cost extra money; that money should have been voted on the assumption that most people who were being charged would require legal aid. The money is theoretically there. If everyone said, ““I want legal aid””, and the Legal Aid Board awarded it on the interests of justice test, the Government would be landed with a bill of, let us say, half—which is probably being quite conservative. This has ceased to be a money argument. The Minister said to me in his meeting, ““It would cost 17 million quid and I haven’t got 17 million quid””—I am sure he does not, and I understand the point he is making—but it is there if people want it and apply for it. They are entitled to it, so he would have to find the £17 million. That is the difficulty. One of the people at yesterday’s meeting said, ““This is a means-tested benefit that is not taken up in the way it should be””. I am certain, because this is the way of the world, that the people at the bottom of the heap, the people who are probably in care, disturbed and all those sorts of things, are less likely to apply because they are not canny. Surely it is the duty of us all to look after the most underprivileged, not only for their benefit but for ours. I do not how often I have to go on saying it, but if we catch, treat and help them early enough, there is a chance that some of them might go straight. I do not deny that some of them are quite disgusting—you can picture them: spotty, surly, baseball cap on backwards, with the occasional grunt coming out. One would want either to lock them up or to cover their feet with concrete and dump them overboard; I quite understand all that. But they are the most underprivileged people and we have to look after them. It is on those grounds that I again raise legal representation. I thank the Minister for his informative letter. I am not sure that my amendment is the right way to do it, but the letter has brought to the public’s notice something that we did not previously know or quite understand. I beg to move.