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Mr. Eric Illsley (Barnsley, Central) : Is not the crux of the matter the fact that we have no facts and figures apart from those in the Select Committee report? Moreover, it is clear that there is a dispute among members of the Committee about whether such fees are paid.
Dame Jill Knight : I agree. As the Chairman of the Committee has pointed out, we were not trying to decide where savings could be made ; the points to which I have referred simply arose as we went along. In what I assure hon. Members will be a short speech, I wish to deal with the Legal Aid Board from a rather different angle. Its activities concern me very much. If a Member of Parliament has reason to question the allocation of legal aid, he had better understand that the board will deal with his inquiry with all the courtesy, helpfulness and understanding of a thug with a leaded sock. In cases brought to me, legal aid has been granted to would- be litigants with ample resources : indeed, that point was raised in an intervention. One such litigant had four cars, and lived very well in an extremely pleasant and expensive house.
Mr. Peter Butler (Milton Keynes, North-East) : Everyone has four cars.
Dame Jill Knight : I assure my hon. Friend that I have only one. However, I am not applying for legal aid.
The parties against whom that constituent wished to act--this was not a criminal matter, but a neighbourhood dispute involving planning--were astounded to find themselves being taken to court. They lived next door to my constituent, and saw the style in which he lived : they saw unmistakable signs of affluence. Nevertheless, the grant was provided, enabling that man almost to ruin the people against whom he was acting. It was they, of course, who complained to me.
I felt that legal aid should not have been granted in that case. I wrote to the Lord Chancellor's Department, which--in the time-honoured manner of Government
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Departments--handed me on to another Department, or at least said that I had better write to the Legal Aid Board. I did so. I believe that I had a perfect right to question the board about its decision. Public money was being used. I did not want to be given confidential facts about the case ; I simply wanted to know that the full facts of the matter--which had been reported to me, and on which I had reported to the Legal Aid Board--had been properly considered. I felt that I had a right to a proper answer. I feel very strongly that all Members of Parliament have not merely a right but a duty to pursue what they consider to be genuine complaints.Mr. James Pawsey (Rugby and Kenilworth) : My hon. Friend is making a persuasive case, to which I have listened with interest. Is she aware that, in certain cases, it might be possible to refer such queries to the Parliamentary Commissioner, who would be only too pleased to pursue them in more detail and at greater length? My hon. Friend may agree with my view that the Commissioner's office is under-used by the House. In this regard, he could be the right arm of Members of Parliament.
Dame Jill Knight : I shall consider that helpful suggestion carefully.
It seems sensible to me for someone who queries what the Legal Aid Board is doing to go straight to the board itself. I did that : I wrote a courteous letter, giving the facts as I knew them. The answer I received was rude, dismissive and completely uninformative. It was a "Yes, Minister" version of : "Go to hell : we do what we want, and no one is allowed to question us." That will not do. Surely Members of Parliament form the only body that can question the Legal Aid Board ; I know of no other organisation that can say to the board, "Are you sure you are absolutely right?" It appears, however, that no one has the right to expect a courteous and informative answer from the board.
Let me ask my hon. Friend a direct question : will he please examine this matter? It concerns not only me, but other hon. Members who have raised similar cases with the Legal Aid Board and have tried to persuade it to behave in a civilised and helpful manner. 5.36 pm
Mr. Robert Maclennan (Caithness and Sutherland) : I do not often agree with the hon. and learned Member for Burton (Mr. Lawrence), although we have a long history of debating matters such as this. It goes back to the days when we sat our Bar exams together. However, I sympathised with a good deal of his speech, especially his positive suggestions for getting to the root of the problem of the rising cost of legal aid. [Interruption.] If the hon. Member for Stockton, South (Mr. Devlin) wishes to intervene, he will take up a little of my time ; if he does not, perhaps he will kindly refrain from gesticulating in a manner which suggests that he does.
The proposals that we are discussing will be extremely damaging to the rights of ordinary people. I shall not engage in an argument about the precise number who will be hit ; even the Government have acknowledged that more than 120,000 people in England and Wales will drop
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out of legal aid altogether. The Law Society of England and Wales properly drew attention to the much larger penumbra who will have to make contributions. No one has attempted to deny that the society was probably right in saying that as many as 12 million families could be affected by the Government's proposals.Mr. Butler : Will the hon. Gentleman give way?
Mr. Maclennan : Madam Speaker has asked for short speeches. As I do not intend to speak for long, I should prefer not to give way. Mine will be the only Liberal contribution to this brief three-hour debate.
The Law Society of Scotland has also produced some figures, which no one has seriously contested, about the damage that the proposals will do. I find the lumping together of debates on the English and Scottish arrangements unacceptable ; the two subjects are entirely distinct and require distinct solutions. There must be a proper review of the Scottish criminal justice system, not just the administration of legal aid in Scotland.
One significant difference between the Scottish and English and Welsh systems is that, although rising, the average cost of a case in Scottish courts is a little over half that in English and Welsh courts. It is perverse of the Scottish Office to beat the people of Scotland with the same stick as is being used in England and, on the coat tails of the Lord Chancellor, to impose cuts which are not necessary even judged purely in terms of public expenditure costs in Scotland. Indeed, the Government have predicted a long-term decline in the demand for legal aid in Scotland due to demographic changes. Perhaps the most serious aspect of the debate is not the hardship that these measures will create, appalling though it may be--hon. Members have said that family law cases are most likely to involve serious hardship--but that the measures will not even address the problem that they are apparently designed to address. On 3 February, in evidence to the Public Accounts Committee, of which I have the honour to belong, the Permanent Secretary to the Lord Chancellor's Department told us that these measures will not reduce expenditure on legal aid but will merely restrain it--and only slightly at that. In other words, we are being asked to swallow something that will not tackle the problem that the Lord Chancellor's Department has identified. We have not had from the Lord Chancellor's Department, and certainly not from the Under-Secretary of State for Scotland, any evidence about how it is proposed effectively to tackle the problem of the spiralling costs of legal aid. We were told that the measures will not be terribly damaging to the interests of those whose eligibility has been reduced--the Department focused on that point--but the debate should address the question of how to get at the root problem.
The rights that these measures are interfering with are of no use unless they can be exercised, and liberties are of no value unless they can be protected. The purpose of the law is to ensure that our rights and liberties are protected. If a person cannot pursue his legal rights in court or defend himself against attack, those rights and liberties do not exist and, in a real sense, the Government's proposals contribute to the creation of a lawless society. There is no doubt that the rising cost of legal aid is a challenge to everyone who cares about access to justice and that, unchecked, there would have to be a substantial further injection of cash to provide an adequate service
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from the existing system, but I draw the House's attention to comments that the Lord Chief Justice, Lord Justice Taylor, made in another place in an earlier debate on the subject. He said : "Experience shows that so far from saving overall costs by denying legal aid, costs may be incurred which legal aid may have avoided. There are many cases in which a litigant in person ploughs on when legal advice would have persuaded him that he had no case. He is likely to take more of the court's time partly because he may have difficulty in presenting his case intelligently and partly because the court needs to be more indulgent to him The Master of the Rolls tells me that already about 20 per cent. of the sitting time in the Court of Appeal (Civil Division) is taken up by litigants in person."--[ Official Report, House of Lords, 3 February 1993 ; Vol. 542, c. 282-3.]In short, if economies are to be made which do not result in the denial of justice, there is little choice but to look seriously at the system of courts, advice and assistance. In so far as there is a royal commission sitting on the criminal justice system, it might be argued that no serious amendments of the kind being considered today should have been introduced before the report of the royal commission, which no doubt will have relevant comments to make on procedure and evidence.
I therefore--in no sense comprehensively--conclude my remarks by offering a few suggestions which are worthy of consideration as to how we might seek better to address the problem of how to spend the money that we have, rather than simply cutting to save money. First, the Government should consider the possibility of taking a firm step on the road towards a more comprehensive system of alternative dispute resolution than is currently offered. Demand on the courts could be reduced by diverting cases to tribunals and hearings, whose decisions could be made binding. Secondly, we should extend the requirement for compulsory insurance into areas where it is appropriate to do so, which could reduce the need of many to go to court, as it has in employment, personal injury and traffic accident cases.
Thirdly, we should consider extending the role of the ombudsman, encouraging trade associations to set up their own ombudsman for each industry as an alternative and cheaper means of satisfactorily resolving disputes outside the courtroom. Fourthly, we should consider introducing wider use of plea bargaining. A guilty plea would result in a lower sentence, less time in court and lower cost. Justice must still be done and innocents must be protected from pressures to plead guilty. The Seabrook model provides a starting point for such a system, but not a perfect one. Fifthly, we should consider wider use of judges' summonses for directions in criminal cases. This allows the judge to manage the progress of the trial by calling for documents at specific times, thus facilitating a speedier, and therefore cheaper, procedure.
We must also recognise the extent to which weak cases constitute an expensive and unnecessary burden on the courts. The Bar Council has recommended that the merits test of the Legal Aid Act 1988 should be tightened to provide a workable and sufficiently realistic equivalent to the pressures and choices imposed on private litigants. We must find a more efficient and comprehensive means of providing advice and representation. I note, with approval, the proposal of the chairman of the Bar Council that every barrister might be asked to undertake at least one free case each year--pro bono publico. That is the kind of gesture which could make quite a significant impact on costs. The Lord Chancellor has signalled his
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desire to introduce franchising and fixed fees, against many objections by the legal profession that neither of the proposals would have beneficial effects. If the Government press ahead with their proposals, I foresee that they will simply deprive large parts of the country of the benefits of legal advice from solicitors, who will close down their operations. That is entirely the wrong track to take.Mr. David Nicholson : Will the hon. Gentleman give way?
Mr. Maclennan : I said that I would not give way, but as I have particular regard for the hon. Gentleman I will give way briefly.
Mr. Nicholson : I am most grateful. As a fellow member of the Public Accounts Committee, and also as a member of the Parliamentary Commissioner for Administration Select Committee, I am following the hon. Gentleman's proposals with great interest and considerable approval. They are alternative ways of resolving a genuine problem. I have not yet heard him mention what role the Child Support Agency may have in moving into administrative procedures matters, which are currently resolved in the courts at great length and often unsatisfactorily.
Mr. Maclennan : That is one of the proposals to which the Government should give serious and constructive consideration. I was about to mention the provision of advice through law centres. The funding and proper provision of law centres can be enormously helpful in creating an efficient, effective and accessible source of help, which can substantially reduce the costs of legal aid. However, local authorities across the country are finding it increasingly difficult to fund them, and 10 have closed in the past few years. There could be tremendous savings if such organisations were properly funded. I acknowledge that it is difficult to give a precise estimate of their economic value, but their important scope and worth has long been recognised. As long ago as 1979, the royal commission on legal services concluded that their impact had been
"out of all proportion to their size".
I draw to the Minister's attention the fact that a large amount of work is pre-empted--for example, in the case of groups of tenants of housing estates. In such instances, their work can prevent expenditure.
I cite an example from, I believe, the constituency of the hon. Member for Brent, South (Mr. Boateng). The Brent law centre represented 2,350 council tenants as a single group against the local authority. Had the cases been dealt with by a private practice, each of the 2,350 litigants would have had to be represented individually. In the future, law centres could offer still further scope for innovative and efficient means of delivering local services. For example, they are in an ideal position to provide a duty solicitor scheme in county courts for cases where representation is crucial, paid on a sessional basis.
We must examine the administration of the courts themselves. Delays in courts and the problems created by non-attendance are expensive. In 1991, the National Audit Office survey, which was conducted before the sitting of the Public Accounts Committee, found that 66 per cent. of clients had experienced delays in the handling of their case but the true causes of such delays are apparently unknown to the Lord Chancellor's Department. The technology that the Department says may help it to monitor such problems
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will not be in place until later this year, despite the fact that the Public Accounts Committee recommended that it should be set up as long ago as 1986. It is clear from the National Audit Office survey that many court administrative practices are inefficient and inappropriate to the volume and complexity of today's cases. I have suggested a substantial package of reforms which is illustrative rather than exhaustive. It is clear that we cannot continue year after year to try to shore up our crumbling system of legal aid by further cuts in eligibility. It is entirely misleading for the Government to suggest that the only people who will be adversely affected by what the Government are doing are those who are dropping out of legal aid. It is the people on low incomes, just above the income support level, who will be most adversely affected. I believe that the measures should be withdrawn. They should not be implemented on 12 April as intended, and no measures should be brought before the House to cut eligibility for legal aid unless and until the Government are able to diagnose why legal aid costs are spiralling in some parts of the system and what steps they can and will take to reduce the unacceptable increases in costs. Such proposals must be more pertinent than those before us. The reform of our faulty system is necessary and urgent.5.54 pm
Mr. Edward Garnier (Harborough) : Thank you for calling me at this time, Madam Deputy Speaker. I shall also endeavour to be as brief as I can. I had planned to make a three-hour or four-hour speech until your earlier admonition. The hon. Member for Caithness and Sutherland (Mr. Maclennan) has, as ever, made a thoughtful contribution to our proceedings, and I am sure that he will have been listened to with great care.
Before coming to the guts of my speech, may I attempt to clear up an apparent confusion in the mind of my hon. Friend the Member for Birmingham, Edgbaston (Dame J. Knight)? She mentioned some enormous figures for the daily rates for counsel for reading papers and so on. Page 11 of the minutes of evidence to the Select Committee on Home Affairs contains an exchange between the hon. Member for Sunderland, South (Mr. Mullin) and Mr. Birts QC, one of the barristers who gave evidence. The hon. Member for Sunderland, South said :
"It has been put to us, for example, that a barrister in a child law case would receive £300 per hour for reading papers and £2,000 a day as refreshers. The Director of Public Prosecutions said to us a while ago that her average payment brief fee to a QC for an average 2.6 day trial was £7,585. I have to put it to you that these are bizarre sums of money to those of us who are not lawyers." Mr. Birts said :
sked that question. The hon. Gentleman said, "Yes." Mr. Birts continued :
"I think it is important to know that and to know whether they have been through the taxation process or the assessment process. Are they taxation figures or not?"
It is likely that that question was based on a false premise or that there was a misunderstanding about the evidence that the DPP had given to the Committee on another matter.
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What is more telling is that a little later, in paragraph 67 on page 12, the hon. Member for Sunderland, South wanted to know what was"the average payment in a criminal case per hour, first of all, and then what is the average refresher?"
Mr. Calvert-Smith, a junior from the Bar, answered :
"The base figure is £29 an hour. That is the base figure upon which 86 per cent. of all criminal cases are paid because they are standard fee cases."
The hon. Member for Sunderland, South replied :
"You amaze me, I must say."
Mr. Calvert-Smith said :
"I am sorry, it is true."
The hon. Gentleman then asked :
"You are telling us--let us be clear--that the average barrister charges £29 an hour?"
Mr. Calvert-Smith replied :
"We do not charge the legal aid system in 86 per cent. of cases. We are sent a brief which says "Standard fee" on it. We know exactly to the last pound and shilling what we are going to get paid, and we know that that has been based on the figure of £29 an hour prep."-- preparation--
"as average in all standard cases, so that is the base figure. That is what the Lord Chancellor thinks that he is paying as an average fee to 86 per cent. of criminal practitioners."
I hope that that has cleared up some of the confusion which arose unwittingly in the speech of my hon. Friend the Member for Edgbaston.
I start with one or two givens, which I am sure will be accepted by all hon. Members. The legal aid system was one of the great legal reforms of the century. Its introduction into our system of legal affairs just after the second world war was a benchmark. It was the intention of the Rushcliffe report, after which the system was established, that no one should be
"financially unable to prosecute a just and reasonable claim or defend a legal right."
That principle has been reasserted throughout the decades since 1949 and was endorsed in other words by the Lord Chancellor. He told the Home Affairs Select Committee :
"The legal aid scheme exists to ensure that ordinary people can have the protection of the law. It is the legal aid scheme which gives many people access to the law, and underpins justice and the freedom of the individual."
Mrs. Barbara Roche (Hornsey and Wood Green) : I am interested to hear the hon. Gentleman quote what the Lord Chancellor told the Home Affairs Select Committee of which I, too, am a member. How does he reconcile that with what the Lord Chancellor said in 1990 : "What we need to debate in the 1990s is the need to secure better access for those whose means exclude them from the legal aid scheme but are not sufficient to pursue cases through the courts"? Do not the Lord Chancellor's present proposals run totally contrary to that, and to what the hon. Gentleman has just quoted?
Mr. Garnier : I am sure that the hon. Lady will have a chance to make a contribution in due course, and I believe that the Under-Secretary of State for Scotland has already dealt with that question. There will always be a cut-off point ; some people will always be on the wrong side of the boundary, and a humane society must seek to mitigate the effects of that as far as possible. We must bear in mind the fact that it is estimated that, by the financial year 1995, we shall be talking about a legal aid budget of £1.5 billion in cash terms. That is a lot of money, even in the language of the hon. Member for Hornsey and Wood Green (Mrs. Roche). A substantial
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proportion of the gross cost of some aspects of the legal aid budget is recovered--especially in cases such as personal injury. However, it has to be faced, whether we like it or not, that net costs have risen at well above the rate of inflation.Perhaps I should make the declaration that I too am a member of the Bar, although, as I have probably done no more than four legal aid cases in 15 or 16 years at the Bar--I specialise entirely in defamation work, which is one of the exceptions to the legal aid provisions--I may be able to talk with some disinterest--
Mr. Paul Boateng (Brent, South) : Being privately funded.
Mr. Garnier : Labour Members may think that I am one of the fat cats of the privately funded Bar, but I too was open-mouthed and most impressed by the figures presented by the hon. Member for Sunderland, South in his questioning of Mr. Birts. No one in my chambers would look askance at those fees.
Sir Ivan Lawrence : May I vouch for the moderation of my hon. Friend's fees?
Mr. Nicholls : They are all lawyers on that Committee.
Dame Jill Knight : No, they are not.
Mr. Garnier : They are not. My hon. Friend the Member for Edgbaston and the hon. Member for Sunderland, South are not lawyers ; nor is my hon. Friend the Member for Ryedale (Mr. Greenway). All three of them have played a great part in our deliberations and have been most helpful to all of us.
Little research has been done into why the costs are rising at such a rate. Some limited research has been carried out by the Legal Aid Board, and the National Audit Office has reported on its behalf. The report shows a substantial rise in the numbers of letters written and telephone calls made per case, and so forth, but no single explanation is given.
Nor were the legal professions able to give us an in-depth analysis of the reasons for the growth in costs. Witnesses recognised a number of factors that might have been causes of the massive and increasing rise in costs. In civil cases, there are the effects of the Children Act and the growth of judicial review. Witnesses also identified an increased awareness of litigation and of legal rights, which my hon. and learned Friend the Member for Burton (Sir I. Lawrence), our Chairman, has already mentioned.
Other witnesses mentioned administrative failures in the legal system, including listing inefficiencies and adjournments in the magistrates courts. My experience in the Queen's Bench division of the High Court and in the civil jury list is that efficiencies have been manifest, and libel actions and civil jury actions set down come on for trial within 29 days after setting down, rather than the two-year wait on which we often used to rely some time ago. Sir Michael Davies, the judge in charge of the jury list, and his successor in that office, Mr. Justice Drake, have done tremendous work to increase efficiencies. The need for efficiencies has been recognised and the efforts are bearing fruit, especially in the division in which I practise. With proper training of listing officers and the proper use of computers, and good will both from the administration
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and from practitioners, there is no reason why further improvements could not be made in other courts, especially the criminal courts. For reasons of time, I shall not detail all the factors that witnesses identified to the Committee as being responsible for the immense rate of increase in the cost of legal aid. Suffice it to say that that cost has effectively doubled as a proportion of Government expenditure. No Government, regardless of the economic circumstances that we are presently in but are shortly to come out of, could allow increased expenditure at that rate without some check upon it. The Committee unanimously agreed that a full and detailed analysis of the reasons for the rise in demand for legal aid, and for the increase in costs per case, must be undertaken. I differ from the hon. Member for Caithness and Sutherland and the hon. Member for St. Helens, South (Mr. Bermingham), who said that the inquiry should take place before today's regulations came into effect. In my suggestion--I almost said "in my submission"--the regulations which, assuming a fair wind this evening, will come into force on 11 April, will act as a catalyst and encourage debate about that aspect of Government expenditure.The Lord Chancellor told us in his evidence :
"if current rates of growth were allowed to continue, expenditure on legal aid would be likely to be close to £2 billion by 1995-96". That would represent an exact doubling of the proportion of public expenditure devoted to legal aid in 1987-88.
Now I shall mention some of our suggestions about how savings could be increased. We concluded in our report :
"The savings forecast will be made under the legal aid head of the Lord Chancellor's budget. It is a notorious problem of public expenditure planning that savings in one area may result in costs in another, without any mechanism for properly judging those costs and taking them into account in the equation."
Clearly the Lord Chancellor had views on the matter, as did those who gave evidence to the Committee and supplied evidence in written form.
In my private conversations with members of the judiciary, especially members of the Court of Appeal, the question of the added costs to the system of administering justice brought about by an increase in the number of unprepared or incompetent--I use that term strictly--litigants in person clogging up the system, especially in the Court of Appeal, is frequently raised. For example, the Registrar of the Court of Appeal now has five legal civil servants working for him, employed more or less full time in trying to untangle the propositions advanced by litigants in person who wish to apply to that court. I suggest that there are better uses of those civil servants' time than seeking to read the green ink--hon. Members on both sides of the House will no doubt recognise the green ink syndrome. It seems an utter waste of the intellect and time of Court of Appeal judges and of the registrar's civil servants that they should have to wade through all that before being able to reach a judicial conclusion. But identifying that problem does not mean that we can sit back and say, "More money, more money", irrespective of whether that money is being wisely spent.
Others suggested that people would bring cases at first instance which lacked merit, by virtue of their not having been given legal aid. Under order 18, rule 19, of the rules of the Supreme Court--I am sure that an equivalent
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procedure is available in the county courts- -there is a method by which cases can be struck out summarily if they want merit. I do not see why litigants in person should be treated differently from represented litigants. If their cases lack merit, they should be snuffed out at birth.Mr. Donald Anderson (Swansea, East) : They are.
Mr. Garnier : I am told that they are. All the better for that.
Mr. Anderson : When I said that they are, I mean that it is my understanding that judges lean over backwards, understandably, to help the litigant in person. That will clearly be a further cog in the machine and another matter on the side of the equation to which the hon. Gentleman referred.
Mr. Garnier : I acknowledge the point that the hon. Gentleman makes, but I should like to move on.
We must consider how we are to save money in the longer term as well as identifying the need to save money and deal with the problem as it is currently presented to us. The first area in which we in the Committee believe that savings can be made is in the administration of the present legal aid system. The matter was the subject of a recent report from the National Audit Office and has been the subject of hearings of the Public Accounts Committee, which will, I believe, shortly produce a report by which we will no doubt be informed. But that should not prevent us at this stage from doing our best and taking steps to check the unmitigated flow of money into the legal aid system without its being properly accounted for.
It is not just the mechanics of the present system that may need scrutiny. Others have talked about the need to look at the planning and overall strategy of the legal aid system since its inception in 1949. The furore that the Lord Chancellor's proposals have engendered may act as a catalyst to allow a more fundamental and strategic look at the purposes of legal aid and at the best means of delivering service to the consumer.
My hon. and learned Friend the Member for Burton has outlined a number of the alternatives that might be available--alternative legal disputes settlements and so forth. I would just caution the House about being too easily seduced by short-cut judicial remedies, because hasty court work is often not conducive to bringing justice into the world. There are a lot of criticisms to be made of the "no win, no fee" system. It simply does not apply sensibly to cases where injunctive relief or other equitable relief is being sought, and that is very often the case in legal aid matrimonial cases.
We all accept the need to find value for money, but I would suggest that we start that now rather than allowing the debate to rumble on without a proper date being put on it.
In his evidence to us, the Lord Chancellor has made it quite clear that he has an open mind--
Mr. Elfyn Llwyd (Meirionnydd Nant Conwy) : Will the hon. Member give way?
Mr. Garnier : I am conscious of the time, and I really must push on.
Mr. Llwyd rose--[Interruption.]
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Madam Deputy Speaker (Dame Janet Fookes) : Order. The hon. Gentleman knows that, if the Member who has the Floor does not give way, he must resume his seat.
While I am on my feet, may I remind the hon. Member that there are no bonus points for Members who make long speeches when the Chair has requested short ones?
Mr. Garnier : That was exactly the admonition I had in mind in not giving way. I do not wish to be unkind, but I know that other hon. Members wish to speak.
All interested parties are now in a frame of mind where they are prepared to meet and, I would suggest, discuss constructively how best to achieve the common aim of us all, ensuring the best delivery of justice to the public. This set of regulations is just the beginning of assisting to that end. I commend the regulations to the House as but the beginning of the process.
6.13 pm
Mr. William McKelvey (Kilmarnock and Loudoun) : If there is anything that I am famous for, it is the brevity of my speeches. I am not sure about the quality.
First of all, on behalf of Scotland and England and Wales, I protest at the fact that we have squeezed these two debates into one, in a time which is totally insufficient to begin to discuss the seriousness of these affairs. Only two weeks ago, we managed to get two separate debates on the late opening of betting shops in England and Wales and in Scotland, and, important as that subject may be, it pales into insignificance beside the importance of what is happening here. It is a disgrace, and it also confuses the issue. The Minister constantly moved back and forth between England and Wales and Scotland, yet it is impossible, because the two systems are not comparable. Because of that, there will be a lot more confusion of those who are listening to the debate elsewhere.
Before I am accused of being some sort of ethnic cleanser, I want to point out that I do not distance myself from the business of England and Wales and Ireland in this matter, because the justice which ought to prevail for everyone is equal in all those areas of the United Kingdom. I am an internationalist, not a nationalist, particularly where justice is concerned.
I notice with great interest that the Select Committee on Home Affairs spent a great deal of time discussing the reasons for the increase. That was understandable, although the Committee did not have the extended time that it would have needed to go into all the ramifications of trying to put that right. But my recollection, if it is correct, is that there was very little discussion of the recession as a contributory factor. This was in contrast to the 1991 annual report of the Scottish Legal Aid Board, which observed :
"it seems likely that the recession has been a significant contributory factor"
in the growth in demand for civil legal aid and an
"exceptionally high and unexpected rise"
in the volume of accounts received by the board. At that time, it was indicating, at least to the Government, that, as regards Scotland, an increase was on its way. The Government had plenty of time to look at the reasons for the increase because they were given the warning then.
However, as far as I can gather, the most significant cause of the increase in the cost of legal aid in England and Wales identified by the Lord Chancellor--the rise in the average cost per case--appears not to be a factor in
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