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Community Legal Service (Funding) (Counsel in Family Proceedings) (Amendment) Order 2009

Of course, and I started this part of my speech by saying that comparisons are very difficult to do. It is undoubtedly true that the cost of courts in this country is much lower than in other countries, but the cost of legal aid in this country is much higher than in other countries. We have an adversarial system, so any comparison with civil legal systems is bound to be particularly difficult. However, you can make better comparisons with other common law countries than you can with civil systems. It would be hard for argue that, for various reasons, some good and some bad, we do not spend much more than other countries per head on legal aid across the field. We, as a Government, think that that is an excellent thing. We continue to provide a vital link to justice for many people, particularly the most vulnerable in our communities. I remind the Committee that every year legal aid provides around 2.5 million acts of assistance to people with their legal problems. With regard to the social welfare element of the budget, which is much too small and has been the poor relation of legal aid for 60 years, we are committed to helping people with the problems that can bedevil their lives. Our commitment to that is evident, with an increase in funding of £80 million for legal services delivered by the not-for-profit sector on civil matters, compared with around £24 million in 2000-01. At a time of recession, it is particularly important that we do not slow down our spend at all in that field, and that is why we have provided more money for debt, housing and employment cases. I particularly mention the housing possession court duty scheme, which helped nearly 34,000 people last year. Under our reform programme, which has been mentioned, steps are being taken to sustain that commitment but also to prioritise the legal aid budget effectively to ensure that it goes as far as possible in favour of civil help for those who need it most. Surely any Government would have to try to remove duplication or inefficiency and secure value for money. Doing so would mean that as many people as possible would continue to benefit by getting the legal help that they need, and we are committed to ensuring that that happens. The challenge today and in the future is to help as many people as possible with a large but limited budget. We spend around £2.1 billion on legal aid. Spending on legal aid in the past 20 years has increased from £835 million in today’s prices, which is an average annual real-terms growth of about 5 per cent and one of the fastest growing areas of public expenditure. Of our budget of £2.1 billion, about £1.2 billion goes on crime—that is far too much; the balance is wrong—and only about £900 million on civil, which includes family, asylum and immigration, and social welfare law. In 1983-84, the total spend on legal aid in real terms was about £572 million, which, interestingly, is just less than what we have spent on family legal aid alone this year. Last month, my department announced a review to be conducted by Sir Ian Magee into the delivery of legal aid to ensure that the £2.1 billion budget is delivering best value for money, that it provides a healthy and sustainable future for social welfare law and that it effectively integrates the criminal defence service within the criminal justice system. The review, whose importance it is difficult to exaggerate, will assess the delivery and governance arrangements of the legal aid system and make recommendations to explore the separation of the criminal defence service and the Community Legal Service—which has been argued for for a long time by people across the political spectrum—and options for doing so effectively and efficiently, should that be the recommended way forward. It will also provide for effective and transparent financial management of both funds and their administration. In the 10 years since the Legal Services Commission was established, there have been considerable changes in the type of legal advice services that the public need, and we believe now is the right time seriously to review the channels through which legal aid is delivered, together with our wider reform programme, to ensure that we are getting the best value for taxpayers’ money. That is even more important at a time of economic difficulty. I shall not move into the criminal legal aid debate at the moment, but will go straight to family. We are keen to ensure that we support the provision of help to people with the housing, debt and employment problems that so often trigger not only family breakdowns but the descent into crime. However, the need to secure value for money and to prioritise our resources in everything we do means that we must look at reform on the civil and family side too. In this debate, there is a danger of confusing two orders. There is the order that has been in force since 3 August and prompted the noble and learned Baroness’s debate. There is also a pending order to do with the new contracts to be signed to come into operation from 1 October 2010. One cannot look at one proposal without looking at the other. The second order is the now-published harmonised family advocacy scheme. The family graduated fees scheme order that came into operation in August is before us this evening. Spending across all levels of family legal aid has increased fairly dramatically in the past seven years from £399 million in 2001-02 to £582 million in 2007-08, which is an increase in real terms of 24 per cent. The new harmonised schemes—and who could be against harmonised schemes?—will direct more money into public law cases to ensure that children and adults at risk of abuse take the highest priority for legal services. The fee schemes do not represent cuts to the family legal aid budget or to the services received by children and families. They have been designed to be cost-neutral against 2007-08 average case costs and for the first time—not before time—the fees will fairly reward barristers and solicitors with the same fees for the same work. I trust that there is no opposition to that principle. We have closely involved family lawyers in developing our policy on these changes and, as a result, we made substantive changes to our original proposals to ensure that the new structure would better reflect the variety of cases that advocates deal with and, particularly, their complexity. It has been generally accepted, whether grudgingly or less grudgingly, that the new scheme, which was published last month, does a great deal more service to the complexity argument than the original consultation.