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11 Jan 2007 : Column 170WH—continued
I turn to civil legal aid. We heard this afternoon that the proposal for a single national fixed fee for advice work in each legal field will lead to many problems. The
Government say that it will be cost-neutral, but I put it to the Minister that the picture in civil legal aid is pretty grim. Civil practitioners received a rise of 2.5 per cent. in 2004 in legal aid fees. There was no increase in 1993, 1994, 1997, 1998, 1999 or 2000. It is a matter of great concern that the number of offices with civil legal aid contracts fell from 4,301 in March 2004 to 3,632 in March 2006—and the number is falling fast.
Lord Carter proposed a graduated fee scheme for solicitors doing family and welfare-related work. Why did the Government not take Lord Carter’s advice? Why did they not listen to what he had to say? Standard fees are obviously are very different. Although I welcome the Government’s decision to reconsider and delay the introduction of standardised fixed fees in relation to family, immigration and mental health law, fixed fees will definitely be introduced for others areas of social welfare law, including housing, employment, welfare benefit, debt, community care and education law in October—in a few months.
I ask the Minister to consider her Department’s regulatory impact assessment. It confirms that a standard fixed fee will mean a loss of income for 38.6 per cent. of providers. The Law Society’s document on the subject is a pretty comprehensive survey of the various points of view put by different organisations. It makes it clear that 82 per cent. of family practitioners believe that their firm is less likely to undertake publicly funded work in future; that 78 per cent. of mental health practitioners are considering whether to continue to represent publicly funded clients and believe that the quality of service will decline; that 72 per cent. of immigration practitioners say that their firms are less likely to undertake legal aid work in future, and 67 per cent. thought that the quality of the service would decline; and that 95 per cent. of civil aid practitioners believe that the proposed fixed fees would make their work non-viable. That is pretty staggering.
Jeremy Corbyn: Does the hon. Gentleman know or have an estimate of the shortage of practitioners who are prepared to take on immigration or asylum cases? My experience as an inner-city Member is that large numbers of people are barely if at all represented in very serious cases and that we need an increase in the number of practitioners.
Mr. Bellingham: I am grateful to the hon. Gentleman for making that point. I have a brief from the Immigration Law Practitioners Association, which makes it clear that there is already a severe shortage of young people coming into this area of law. It is concerned about the potential impact that these changes will have because the supply of new, young practitioners may dry up completely. That is also borne out by the Association of Lawyers for Children.
Vera Baird: I did not hear the name of the organisation that the hon. Gentleman mentioned. Has he spoken to the Immigration Law Practitioners Association? I need to know so that I can deal with his point when I sum up.
Mr. Bellingham: Yes, it was the Immigration Law Practitioners Association and the briefing was from the president, Ian McDonald QC. The other organisation that I briefly mentioned was the Association of Lawyers for Children.
Is it any wonder that virtually every organisation out there that has lobbied MPs and expressed opinions is telling us of its dismay? People are very concerned and a range of organisations are involved. First, the Access to Justice Alliance—an organisation that is very well briefed—has said:
“To survive on the proposed fixed fee we would have to exclude some of those most in need whom we currently help. There is unlikely to be another supplier to take them on, so they would simply not receive the help they need”.
The National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children, an organisation that we all know and love, has made it clear that it is gravely concerned about the potential loss of expert legal advice for family law cases resulting from the cuts in legal aid. It says:
“There is already a serious risk regarding the future availability of family legal aid lawyers; the situation will only get worse if the government fails to provide proper support”.
The NSPCC outlines a very distressing case of a young girl called Tracey. She was a heroin addict suffering from post-natal depression and social services tried to remove her baby from care. It was a complex case and I accept the point made by the hon. Member for Ealing, Acton and Shepherd's Bush (Mr. Slaughter) that many of those cases are becoming increasingly complex and difficult. In the case I have outlined, many hours were put in by the solicitor concerned at a substantial loss to the law firm. The solicitor was eventually paid about £9,000 in legal aid money, which may sound a great deal, but it certainly was not anywhere enough to cover the time put in. The bottom line is that Tracey is now off drugs and her life is back on track. That is exactly the type of case that her solicitors believe they would not be able to take on today. The cost of social care and of interventions from other agencies to help Tracey would be far more than the legal aid paid out to her solicitor.
Other organisations involved in this issue are Shelter, Mind, Action Against Medical Accidents and the Mental Health Lawyers Association, which has been lobbying very hard indeed. It sent me an e-mail the other day in which it made it clear that it is not at all happy with what is happening. It states:
“The problem that the Government faces, is that it has squeezed mental health lawyers so hard...there is no slack in the system...The Government faces a potential ‘meltdown’ situation in October. This is not industrial action it will simply be members finding they just cannot do the job”.
“Matters connected with mental health lawyers are going to be looked at again, in connection with practitioners. They have no concerns at all.”—[Official Report, 19 December 2006; Vol. 454, c. 1280.]
However, Richard Charlton, the chair of the Mental Health Lawyers Association, made it clear that that was not the case given his references to ‘meltdown’ and “no slack in the system”. If the Minister thinks that that represents ‘no concerns at all’, she should think again.
Jim Cousins: The number of mental health review tribunals is steadily increasing and the pool of lawyers willing to serve on panels providing staff is steadily decreasing. Does that not illustrate the drift of events that the hon. Gentleman has referred to?
Mr. Bellingham: I am grateful for that intervention from a senior hon. Member. I did have time to read out the whole of Richard Charlton’s brief and the memo in which he makes that very point. Frankly, if the Minister thinks that the Mental Health Lawyers Association has no concerns at all, she should speak to it again.
Vera Baird: I did not say that there were no concerns at all; I said that there were no imminent concerns because we would be going back to look at those fees, and we have done so. The hon. Gentleman should know that I am told that roughly one half of mental health cases are carried out by mental health lawyers who have volunteered on a fixed fee basis.
Mr. Bellingham: The Minister should look at column 1280 of Hansard on 19 December 2006. Perhaps she meant that mental health practitioners had no concerns at all about having another meeting. However, if one looks at Hansard,it certainly seems that she is implying that practitioners should not have any concerns about what is happening. When she meets Richard Charlton and the association, she should try and clear that point up and listen to them very carefully.
The citizens advice bureaux have been extremely active in briefing us. I have many letters from CABs and I will not got through all of them. However, I want to flag up that my local CAB in west Norfolk and the one up the road from me in Boston have grave concerns. In a letter to my hon. Friend the Member for Boston and Skegness (Mark Simmonds), the Boston CAB’s bureau manager, Maggie Peberdy, said:
“As you will know, Boston CAB holds a contract with the Legal Services Commission to provide debt and benefits advice. We strongly believe that the proposed changes will have a damaging impact on our ability to provide essential legal aid services to people with complex welfare benefits or debt problems, and that this in turn will harm the most vulnerable in our community.”
She goes on to list many of her concerns.
The Minister kindly attended a meeting of the all-party Citizens Advice group the other day. At that meeting, the CAB passed on a number of very complex case studies that involved a whole range of factors—for example, those dealing with complex clients suffering from mental illness who require the assistance of outside agencies and third parties including local authorities. Those cases take a long time to resolve.
The Minister should look again at what the CAB has said and at the views of the Association of Lawyers for Children, the Family Law Bar Association and a large numbers of individual firms. I met a firm in my constituency the other day, which is a growing and expanding partnership that is doing well. However, there is a real problem with that business as a number of dedicated partners and lawyers, some of whom do criminal and legal aid and family work, are concerned about whether the firm will be able to carry on offering
the same level of public service. They were kind enough to bring in a family law barrister who expressed exactly the same concerns and who is acting for different solicitors up and down the region. Day in and day out, he expresses in court his very grave concern about whether many of the smaller firms will be able to carry on with this type of work.
Vera Baird: The hon. Gentleman is falling into the very mischief I have spent most of the afternoon trying to stop people falling into. Any family lawyer cannot now say that they will not do any work or that they will be driven out because the fees have not been fixed and are still being negotiated. He is doing what I have tried to stop people from doing: looking back at the situation post-Carter and not looking at the reality now.
Mr. Bellingham: All I can say is that I have received dozens and dozens of letters and e-mails and met a large number of lawyers. I have not yet met one lawyer who supports exactly what the Minister is saying.
I shall conclude now as I know that you, Sir Nicholas, wish to call other Members to speak. However, I am concerned about the black and minority ethnic firms in relation to civil legal aid as the present system is nearly at breaking point. It is already becoming increasingly difficult to find a legal aid solicitor and the Government’s plans will only make that worse. The Minister talks about trying to help and make life easier for the vulnerable, but she should listen to what the experts are saying and trust the judgment and instincts that she so eloquently expressed in the debate on 26 October 2005.
As the shadow Attorney-General said earlier, what is the role of the Lord Chancellor in this? First of all he has downgraded his own job—we gather that was done on the back of an envelope—and has then spent tens of millions of pounds on a new supreme court. He has rewarded his Ministers with a sell-out to the Treasury, or has the Treasury rewarded him for not managing his Department properly? The conclusion that I draw is that some of the most vulnerable people in our constituencies and communities will suffer. That is what concerns us and it is why I very much hope that the Minister will start listening to the people who really know what is going on.
Sir Nicholas Winterton (in the Chair): Order. I make a final plea for good but brief speeches. That is necessary if even those who have written in are to be allowed to make their contributions.
3.50 pm
Simon Hughes (North Southwark and Bermondsey) (LD): I shall seek to heed your reminder, Sir Nicholas.
I am very glad that we are having the debate, which is clearly of enormous significance. The Government had Lord Carter do his work and produce his report; having seen the response to that work, they produced their own proposals at the end of November in the document entitled “Legal Aid Reform: the Way Ahead”, which modified some of Lord Carter’s proposals, and announced a further consultation on some areas, such as family law and mental health. I
hope that, having done that, the Government will now pay attention both to this debate and to the results of the work by the Select Committee on Constitutional Affairs—which, under the chairmanship of my right hon. Friend the Member for Berwick-upon-Tweed (Mr. Beith), is about to start examining this matter, having taken evidence—and only then come to a view on whether to proceed.
My judgment is like that of colleagues on both sides of the House. The hon. Member for Regent’s Park and Kensington, North (Ms Buck), in, if I may say so, a very effective debate recently, put a typical London case, with which I absolutely associate myself, as do many other London Members. We do not want—to misquote Edgar in “King Lear”—to stand up for lawyers. We want to stand up for the people whom lawyers paid in the public service have been looking after, because we believe that there is a risk that they will be squeezed badly by the reforms that we are discussing.
Mr. Oliver Heald (North-East Hertfordshire) (Con): Will the hon. Gentleman give way on that point?
Simon Hughes: Yes, and then I will press ahead.
Mr. Heald: Although I basically agree with the hon. Gentleman, does he not agree with me that the small high street solicitor network is a very important service for the community? They should not be treated as though they are all fat-cat lawyers; they are providing an important service on the front line.
Simon Hughes: I agree absolutely. As far as I know, we have not been lobbied by the senior partner of Linklaters. We have been lobbied by small firms and by people working in citizens advice bureaux, who in my constituency provide an excellent service for people who have been leaseholders of the local authority, or do immigration work. We have also been lobbied by people who have given their lives to family law, such as the person cited earlier, who happens to be a friend of mine from south London and who has spent all her life dealing with child care cases. We have been lobbied by that sort of people.
Mr. Djanogly: Will the hon. Gentleman give way?
Simon Hughes: I will give way once more and then I will press on, in response to your plea, Sir Nicholas.
Mr. Djanogly: I thank the hon. Gentleman for giving way, because he is not quite correct. We have been significantly lobbied by, and there has been a lot in the legal press from, the City firms that do a lot of pro bono work and are now worried that proposals imply that they will be asked to do an awful lot more pro bono work because of how the system is to be structured.
Simon Hughes:
The point that I was trying to make is that the lobby is not composed of fat cats on huge salaries who are trying to defend a privileged position. The lobby is being conducted on behalf of our constituents the length and breadth of the land, who
come to legal advisers with an individual crisis or trouble, or with a set of troubles. As the hon. Member for Meirionnydd Nant Conwy (Mr. Llwyd) rightly said, those people have been rewarded in one case five years ago with an increase of 2 per cent., and in the other case three years ago with an increase of 4 per cent. They are not people who have been coining it in at the expense of the public service.
I want to wrap what I say in the point that the Minister says is not properly addressed to her but that is properly addressed to the Government, because it is about the degree of commitment that the Government have shown to the legal aid service in this country. I checked the figures and they are as follow. Twenty years ago, in 1987-88, the expenditure on legal aid in 2005-06 prices was £836 million. Ten years ago, it was £2.016 billion—again, that is in 2005-06 prices. In 2005-06—the last year for which figures are available—it was £2.1 billion.
The introduction to the Minister’s own report in November made the point that in the period between Labour coming to office and now, the legal aid budget has increased from £1.5 billion to £2 billion. I accept that. It is an increase, as the Minister can work out, of 27.2 per cent. between the comparable dates. The health service has had a 100 per cent. increase in its budget over that period. Public order and safety has had a 77 per cent. increase. Education and training has had an 80 per cent. increase. Total Government expenditure on public services has increased by nearly 60 per cent. The hon. Member for Beaconsfield (Mr. Grieve) was absolutely correct. In the divvying up of the public expenditure cake, the money going to the third pillar of the welfare state—legal services—has creased by significantly less than expenditure on education and health.
If our aim is to look after people and give them the right to education, to health care and to the legal service, we need to ensure that we put the case for a greater envelope of expenditure on legal aid, because if we do not do that, the money will not be found. I accept that. We are coming up to a comprehensive spending review, so I am putting the case—I heard it put by Conservative Members and I heard it put in other terms by Labour Members—that, in the next review, the legal aid budget needs to be increased significantly if it is to keep pace with the pressure on it. We have more people. We have relatively more poorer people. We have more older people. We have more new immigrant people. We have a larger number of people in our black and minority ethnic communities. The reality is that there will be more demand. I sincerely hope that the Minister understands that point. She has to work within the budget given to her but, to put it bluntly, it is not enough, which is one of the principal reasons for the present difficulty.
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