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Sentencing Reform/Legal Aid

We are abolishing the Legal Services Commission. One of the most frequent complaints that I get about the system is the sheer bureaucracy, and it has had serious problems in the past. The Under-Secretary, my hon. Friend the Member for Huntingdon (Mr Djanogly), tells me that we will save £8 million a year simply by bringing this in-house, as we are doing, but we intend to save quite a lot more on the administration of system than that. It is hopeless, given our prime duty of protecting the public, if we waste money in that area and make it one of the most expensive and fast-growing areas of Government expenditure. We hope to make the system effective and targeted, and for it to do what we should be doing, which is protecting the public from crime and giving access to justice to the vulnerable.