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Mr. Deputy Speaker (Sir Alan Haselhurst): Order. If the average length of speeches continues as it is, the many hon. Members who are seeking to catch my eye will not
all succeed in doing so. May I please, therefore, appeal for brevity, so that everyone who wishes to participate may do so before the end of the debate?12.39 pm
Mr. Austin Mitchell (Great Grimsby): I rise with some trepidation, as only the second non-lawyer to speak in this debate. Never have so many lawyers spoken at such great length for so little in fees as this morning.
That is an initial reason for congratulating my hon. Friend the Member for Calder Valley (Ms McCafferty) on her maiden speech. She not only came into the debate as a non-lawyer, as I do, but delivered her speech with great elegance, humour and charm. I congratulate her on an effective maiden speech. I read of her coming in Pete Davies's book "This England" about the campaign in Calder Valley. I was expecting great things and I am sure that she is beginning to deliver them. She certainly did with her speech this morning.
I must say that my hon. Friend was wrong in referring to Donald Thompson as a Chartist. He was in fact an old, not a new Chartist, because the invocation of class hatred would have disqualified him from new Chartism. All that she said about Calder Valley was true. It is the most beautiful part of the country after Grimsby. It is the place that I view with most affection after Grimsby. I congratulate my hon. Friend on being such a wonderful representative. She has worked as a councillor in the interests of the people, and I am sure she will continue to serve them here in the Chamber. My congratulations to my hon. Friend.
Fewer congratulations to the Parliamentary Secretary, Lord Chancellor's Department, however, for proposals which, despite our conversations on the matter, I still fear will lead to cheapjack justice for most people--the kind of legal representation that fell off the back of a practice.
The main motive of the proposals seems to me to be not to bring justice more effectively, promptly and expeditiously to the mass of the people but to cut spending. As soon as a problem is approached from that angle, the approach becomes disastrous. It is certainly true that expenditure is rising. That is not because the legal profession is exploiting the system. The rise in crime is in itself responsible for a huge increase in spending.
People need legal services more as their standard of living rises. It is a feature of a rising standard of living that people want to pursue their rights and all the problems that they have in their lives. The legal system is important in pursuing those rights.
People have higher standards of medical services, building services and consumer services. They need to be able to pursue their rights to those standards. They need the law for that purpose. That is why expenditure on legal aid is rising. It is also rising because of the continued assertion of restrictive practices, particularly by the Bar. It is alarming to see so many speakers from the Bar adding to our debate this morning. A system in which people do not have direct access to a barrister so that they have to go through a solicitor, who takes his cut, and then through a clerk, who takes his cut, inevitably drives up expenses.
Expenditure on legal aid is rising because of the slow and cumbersome processes of the legal system. When one attempts to cut and control spending, it is wrong to place
the main sacrifices on the poor--the people who need a better legal service. Service to the poor and to ordinary people will be curtailed by the Government's proposals. There is no doubt about it. People cannot afford the up-front costs or the insurance costs. They do not have the experience and the confidence to hawk their case around from one set of solicitors to another to get the best terms.
The proposals will result in a worse service for the poor. So will bulk purchasing of legal services. It will lead to cutting of corners, compression and a less adequate service.
I cannot accept all this, even if it is justified with the glowing but unspecific prospect of better things to come, because it is not realistic to start scrapping what we have got in favour of a better "might be", unless we have evidence of what that "might be" will be. We do not--all we are offered is a glowing prospect.
It is right that the Government should hit the ground reviewing, but if ever there was a case for a considered review and considered verdict, it is on legal services. That review has not been conducted. All that the legal services are being offered is a glowing prospect and a ritual chant against fat-cat lawyers, usually delivered by fat-cat lawyers. The Minister is usually an amiable, approachable man and I deprecate the way in which he and the Lord Chancellor are stirring up class hatred against fat-cat lawyers. That is not at the heart of new Labour's mission.
The Government's approach is wrong, especially when we are the party of progress, and the party which defends and represents the interests of the people--the mass of the ordinary people, whose interests need to be protected.
The people need the law more and more in their lives to advance their causes; protect their interests; protect them against the exercise of power or from large organisations; and protect them from all the abrasions of life.
A deep gulf is opening up between the mass of the people and the legal services, which are becoming strangers to the ordinary people because of their escalating costs. We should reform the legal services; the key question is how we can deliver them to the people more effectively. The answer is that the £1.5 billion devoted to legal aid should be spent more rationally.
We cannot, unfortunately, rectify our historic mistake. The Labour party has always had a vision of a legal version of the national health service which provides legal services at the point of need. After the war, the Rushcliffe committee suggested that that could be advanced by establishing 250 law centres across the country. Unfortunately, the Legal Aid and Advice Act 1949, which represented our first step towards implementation of that vision, did nothing about law centres. Instead, it subcontracted legal aid to the Law Society. It was a disastrous mistake to subcontract it to that vested interest. The Treasury knew that at the time and that is why the policy was not fully implemented until 1962. From then on, however, the exponential growth in costs began.
The answer to the problem is to take legal aid back from private practice. Of their nature, those practices are inefficient with high overheads. They cannot achieve economies of scale and they operate on the basis of restrictive practices. We have two sets of private practices whereas an employed service would be much more
efficient, effective and available at the point of need. It would have far lower overheads per case than private practices.
We could provide an employed service through law centres for civil cases. Such a service should be boosted. If money is to be saved from the legal aid budget, why is it not to be spent on law centres, which need it so desperately and which have suffered from such serious financial cuts in the past?
We could also bring legal services back to the people by creating a public defender service for criminal cases, which operates extremely effectively in some of the better American states, such as California. We should enact a right to representation, as exists in the United States and is a constitutional right in European countries such as Sweden. Under that right of representation, people should have the choice to fulfil it by opting for the employed service, which would be dedicated, competitive, efficient and would charge fees as a ratio of a person's income. Alternatively, people could opt to go to a private practice and pay full fees to have their case pursued, or conditional fees, or even contingency fees, as charged in the United States. I would opt for the contingency fees so that private practice had the means to fight back against an employed service.
An employed service structure could be financed out of the £1.5 billion that goes to legal aid, particularly if it is supplemented by local authorities bringing financial support to local law centres and by fees charged in proportion to income. That would parallel the structure of the national health service, which is a successful example that we should use. It has both employed and private practice; it has specialists and generalists; and people can make their choice confident in the knowledge that medical services are there when they need them. That is what we want in the legal service.
Such a measure would be a responsible alternative because it would protect and advance the cause and the powers of the people. That is what the Government should have proposed. The Labour party in opposition should have been developing such ideas instead of lamenting the cutbacks in legal aid and saying that some bonanza in legal aid was in store. Everybody knew that that would not happen because the Treasury would take control of legal aid expenditure. We should have thought the problem through, but, instead, we took a negative stance and criticised what the outgoing Government were doing, without proposing an alternative.
We need that alternative now, which is why, in reviewing legal services in this fashion, my hon. Friend the Minister should start from basics and consider what an employed service could do to bring legal services to the people. Socialism--I am sorry to mention that dreadful word--is about building for everybody the platform of rights, services, education, welfare and jobs that is available to the rich because they have the money to buy them. Part of that platform is the legal services that people need to protect themselves and advance their cause and their rights. Unless we work towards developing a fair society, we shall lessen the odds in favour of the people and increase the odds in favour of power, wealth, privilege and all those who oppress the people and work against their cause.
The law is crucial if we are to arm people in that respect. Regretfully, the Government have opted for cuts, promises that may or may not be kept, and a measure that may or may not work, and about which we have only the barest details. That is because they have approached the issue too quickly and without enough consideration. Only by opposing the proposal will we get better from a Government who want better and will provide better if pushed into it, and if the pressure to cut spending is broken.
I regard the proposals as an infringement not only of the socialism that I would like but of people's basic rights. How will curtailing the provision of legal aid and support to ordinary people, especially the poor, be acceptable under article 6 of the European convention on human rights, which we are about to incorporate into our law? Article 6 speaks of a level playing field in terms of representation. Legal aid provides that by bringing a legal support service to the masses. If we cut that away, we shall infringe the convention and produce far more miscarriages of justice because of inadequate representation and defence. The inevitable outcome will be more appeals, more controversy and more failures, and the legal system will have to go back and redress the problems.
Those are my basic criticisms of proposals that are wrong and should never have been advanced in the first place without our having thought through to basics how we could better serve the cause of those who need legal services.
I wish to make two or three detailed criticisms. Benedict Birnberg has raised in correspondence with me and other Members of the problem of cases against the police. He has cited miscarriages of justice and even cases in which people have been beaten up, had their rights infringed and been maltreated by the police. Those are matters of public interest--certainly the Stoke Newington scandals are of public interest.
When an individual makes a complaint, he faces the whole machinery of oppression from the Home Office, the law, publicly financed litigation for the police force, finance from the Police Federation and so on. How can an individual take on all that with the proposed cuts in legal provision? Some of the cases are bitterly fought to the extent of trying to bankrupt the firm of solicitors handling them. The odds need to be redressed.
Thompsons, a firm of devoted trades union lawyers which does not charge the trade unions or the members whose cases they take on, has raised the incompatibility between the fixed or no costs imposed through the Woolf regime and conditional fees. If the motive of conditional fees is to get costs at the end of the case out of which to pay the lawyers' fees, that is incompatible with the regime envisaged in the Woolf reforms. It is a real problem which must be addressed.
How will medical negligence cases be handled? They are very difficult cases. One of my hon. Friends thinks that they are almost a waste of time and that people should not take on the national health service as it costs it money. I believe that by taking such cases to court, people are acting in the public interest to get an improved service and to maintain standards. Those difficult cases need support.
The Consumers Association, the National Consumer Council and the Policy Studies Institute review of such cases emphasise the need to have conditional fees running
alongside legal aid so that we can assess whether conditional fees actually work. The Non-Practising Barristers Association wants to offer contract services, through law centres, to the Legal Aid Board. That is one way of getting a cheaper legal service from barristers. Why are the Government not taking up that offer?
Indeed, why are the Government not investigating the whole structure of restrictive practices? They say that they are not prepared to interfere with professional organisations, but all Governments seem perfectly prepared to interfere with the trades unions, on any pretext. The Bar Council is nothing but a silk-lined trades union which is exercising enormous power to maintain restrictive practices to the cost of the legal system and the consumer. Why are the Government not considering simplifying the procedures in injury cases through a state-financed scheme, paid for by a levy on insurance companies? That system already operates in New Zealand and it removes much of the legal argument and costs.
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