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Legal Aid, Sentencing and Punishment of Offenders Bill

My Lords, I raise just one or two points about the notion of a compulsory telephone gateway. The first relates to legal professional privilege. Can my noble friend confirm that all communication in the telephone gateways are and will continue to be covered by legal professional privilege, so that we can avoid the risk of cases eventually arriving in court and initial conversations with telephone gateways being used for the purposes of cross-examination when the person accessing the telephone gateway may well have been lacking in confidence and have stated their case in an inaccurate way? The second matter I wanted to raise is about the group of people—and there are many of them—who contact what I will call informed lay services. That would include people going to citizens advice bureaux, well informed councillors, Members of the Welsh Assembly in their constituency surgeries and, of course, Members of Parliament in their constituency surgeries. It would not make much sense if people who had gone through those routes were then required thereafter to access a mandatory telephone gateway. Otherwise, we will run into the ludicrous situation where people sit in those establishments with their MPs and a call is made to the telephone gateway during the constituency surgery. That would of course be an absurdity. Perhaps the Minister would explain to the Committee what is proposed in such circumstances, the ones that I have described being but examples.