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Legal Aid, Sentencing and Punishment of Offenders Bill

My Lords, I want to make one point and one point only but I hope to do so forcibly. If it is mandatory for those seeking assistance to go through a telephone gateway, we will cast adrift a significant minority of our fellow citizens who will never use a telephone gateway for the sorts of problems with which they are confronted. It is a small but significant group, and it would be an irony if the most needy people in our society were the very ones who were, in effect, cut off from access to legal help when they most needed it. I say this from a considerable amount of personal experience working for the Samaritans and for one of the London law centres, and from my life as a young solicitor in a general practice and, indeed, as the director of the first national legal telephone helpline. I emphasise to the Minister that the problem really is not at all obvious. It is a commonplace that the younger generation today is phenomenally computer literate and so on, but there is still a small group of people who are totally lacking in self-confidence and in an ability to analyse their own problems, and they are fearful of being made fools of on a telephone. I could go on describing this group. I quite accept that for the majority of people what is currently proposed is fine but, as my noble friend Lord Shipley and others have said, we must, whatever else we do, have a second route into legal help which does not cut off that most needy group.