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Criminal Defence Service (Information Requests) (Amendment) Regulations 2010

My Lords, I declare an interest because I am in receipt of legal aid fees. The noble Lord, Lord Henley, referred to a jigsaw. What has happened is that the pieces of the jigsaw have all been broken up and thrown into the air; or, to use another metaphor, the architecture of legal aid has completely changed in the decisions announced last week, whereby the Legal Services Commission has been abolished. As I understand it, it was the representation authority which originally granted legal aid, subject to appeals. What is to replace it? The Minister was quoted last week as saying that decisions on the grounds of legal aid will remain completely independent and Ministers will not have any part in them. He also said; ""I want to make it very clear that we consider it essential that there is a clear separation between ministers and funding decisions in individual cases"." Will he take this opportunity to explain what is now meant by the representation authority? Are we moving away from the Legal Services Commission to some unformed executive agency that is in some way up in the air? When will the legal aid package be put together as a whole? Bringing these regulations forward at the moment is jumping the gun, because until we can see the whole picture and what the representation authority referred to in these regulations is, we are at something of a loss. I said last year all that I want to say on the principle, when we debated it first in February and later in November. I shall not repeat my objection in principle to the way in which the Government have gone about reintroducing means tests and so on. The noble Lord knows where I stand on that, but I ask him: is this not premature? Should we not wait at least to find out what executive agency is proposed and how there will be a clear separation between Ministers and funding decisions? The director of the Legal Action Group, described this change as, ""a complete politicisation of legal administration"." These announcements have been made, and there has been a very fetching picture of the Minister in some newspapers. He is not running in the election, so perhaps "politicisation" is taking it a bit far. However, clearly there has been a very important change due to the manifest deficiencies of the Legal Services Commission, which tried and failed over many years to bring some sense to the situation and was heavily criticised last week by the Lord Chancellor, Mr Jack Straw. Those are my questions and I look forward to hearing the answers.