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Legal Aid, Sentencing and Punishment of Offenders Bill

I suggest that the noble Baroness reads our impact assessment, which has been quoted. Our critics cannot have it both ways. At one moment, they are banging the Dispatch Box and saying that the impact assessment reveals this, that and the other terrible finding, and then they say that we have not done any research. The noble Baroness has been in both national and local government. Many people in local government of all parties are having to take tough, difficult decisions. In a time of austerity there are no soft options. We have of course had cross-departmental discussions about the measures. It is almost impossible to assess with any accuracy the various impacts on one department or another of various measures—which involve, at maximum, £350 million in a relatively small department. However, from the debate today one would think that this is going to bring down society as we know it. I do not believe that it will. As I said, our approach has been to try as far as possible to make the restructuring of legal aid focused and fair. Unfortunately, my party did not say in its election manifesto that it intended to cut legal aid—we leave that to the Labour Party.