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Criminal Defence Service (Information Requests) Regulations 2009

My Lords, in June 2007 the Solicitor-General, Miss Vera Baird, addressed an international legal aid conference in Antwerp, shortly after the new scheme introduced by the Criminal Defence Service Act came into force. At the time she said that the rollout of this new financial means testing scheme in the magistrates’ courts would deliver annual savings of more than €50 million, which in those days was around £30 million, but today is £50 million, due no doubt to the way this Government have conducted their finances. I should be interested to know whether her forecast of a €50 million saving has been fulfilled. It may well have been, because in an article published in the Observer on 1 February, just a few weeks ago, the Legal Aid Practitioners Group said that it estimated that more than half of the 11,000 lawyers’ offices willing to take on legal aid work less than a decade ago have either closed down or moved out of the field, leaving a shortage of help available for vulnerable people on modest incomes. Carol Storer, a director of the group, said: "““We are hearing about firms struggling to keep legal aid work going; thousands have stopped their legal aid work altogether. It’s is a massive reduction. It is not just the money—although it is extremely hard to make a living out of this type of work now—but also the bureaucracy involved. The paperwork is overwhelming, and that is a complaint we are hearing all the time. Some firms are just gradually whittling down the numbers of legal aid cases they’ll take on””." I suppose that I had better declare an interest as a practitioner who does legal aid work in the criminal courts, although not in the magistrates’ courts. I can confirm from my own experience that firms are indeed cutting back on legal aid work because it is no longer profitable. The statutory instrument before noble Lords today has nothing to do with the actual quantum of legal aid. We understand that that has been fixed, and any efforts to raise the ceiling are sternly resisted by the Government in whichever field they arise. This instrument is about the sharing of information and is very much a data protection issue. What is the need for it? Why should one government department be able to go to a whole series of other government departments to find out information about an individual? Why is this needed? It is not going to cost any less to do that than the cost of the current system. In the debate on 11 February to which the Minister referred in his opening remarks, Mr Shahid Malik said that this new system will cost £140,000 or so more. It is a more expensive way of calculating the appropriate level at which legal aid will be granted. Will time be saved and delays reduced by doing this? No evidence has been produced to suggest that that is the case. No estimate is made in the impact statement, but perhaps the Minister would like to tell us whether any time will be saved, or will the magistrates’ courts become even more clogged up with applications because they have to means-test and seek information about every single applicant—not, as is the case at the moment, on simply a selection of applicants who voluntarily agree to have their affairs investigated. Is there fraud in the current system? Nothing has been demonstrated by the Government to show that legal aid applicants in criminal cases are fraudulent when they make their applications. How many cases have been brought against applicants for legal aid since October 2006 where it was alleged that they had misrepresented their means in one way or the other? These regulations appear to be what the Government call the ““transformation”” approach—that is the word used in the impact assessment. It talks about transformational government, which enables one department of government to know everything about an individual if he makes an application. We on these Benches are opposed in principle to that approach. It is wrong in principle that any department of government—we do not know at what level the assessment will be made—should be able to gain information just at the drop of a hat. The data sharing culture that is now a part of transformational government is a threat to privacy. It is a threat to the whole concept of data protection. It implies that the Government’s goal is to treat citizens as one individual file with a coherent single relationship with a centralised state, and that the Government should have the right to share that individual’s data among all their organs. We on these Benches are opposed to the principle behind this statutory instrument, which does precisely that. I should like some assurances from the Minister that the protections of the Data Protection Act will be retained, that the necessary consents to the particular information-sharing order will be obtained, and that the whole process should be within the purview of the information commissioner. What appears on the face of it to be a pretty anodyne statutory instrument in effect breaches a number of principles. First, it confirms how legal aid is now being denied to a considerable section of the public because of the means testing and the limits placed upon it. Secondly, it pursues the Government’s transformational processes by making information about the individual available to every single department that has anything to do with that individual. We do not propose to vote against this statutory instrument tonight, and we cannot amend it. However, we remain opposed to it in principle.