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Legal Aid and Civil Costs Reform

My Lords, does the Minister agree that the conflation of the costs of civil and criminal legal aid in the sum of £2 billion, to which my noble friend Lord Bach referred, disguises the greater proportion devoted to criminal legal aid? What will the percentage cut on the civil legal aid budget be? Can he also indicate where he expects alternative provision to be made and at what cost, and who will fund that cost? Perhaps he could also identify an estimate of the number of cases currently in receipt of legal aid in the categories that will no longer receive legal aid: that is, as the Statement made clear, education, employment, immigration, debt, housing and welfare benefits. On a slightly tangential matter, will the Minister ask his right honourable and learned friend the Secretary of State for Justice and Lord Chancellor to look again at the court fees that local authorities are required to pay in child protection cases and which are widely thought to inhibit the necessary promotion of those cases? I declare an interest as an unpaid consultant in my former practice as a senior partner in a Newcastle firm of solicitors.