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Lord Greenway: My Lords, does the noble Lord agree that the job losses will also have an economic impact on the commercial viability of the ports of Fowey and Par, which rely heavily on the export of china clay? Will he also take seriously the suggestion of the noble Lord, Lord Berkeley, that the Government look into finding alternative uses for the waste material from the clay workings? Could not some form of tax incentive be given so that the material would become more environmentally attractive to use than, say, material dredged from under the sea or from other land sites? As someone who grew up in the port of Fowey and
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Lord Sainsbury of Turville: I totally agree that the great difficulties in such situations are not only the immediate impact on those employed by the company but the effect on other, related areas of business. This is clearly a serious problem. The waste material obviously has to be considered when looking at the environment in Cornwall, but there are other ways in which I would want to view long-term jobs: they should be based on modern industries, innovation and new skills. In the end, that is what will give stability to that region.
Baroness Miller of Hendon: My Lords, given that the 800-odd redundancies constitute a much bigger percentage of the jobs in this area than the 6,000 job losses at Loughborough and that they are therefore much more tragic for the employees concerned and for the families who have been in the industry for generations and given that there does not seem to be much hope, can the Minister explain why the Prime Minister, the Chancellor of the Exchequer and the Secretary of State for Trade and Industry all went to Loughborough to talk to the employees there and to try to encourage them and so on, but, as yet, no one from the top has gone to this extraordinarily tragic area?
Lord Sainsbury of Turville: My Lords, the job losses in Cornwall will be just as bitterly felt as those at MG Rover. However, there is one important difference: the real problem with MG Rover was that 6,000 jobs were lost overnight, and that was a very difficult situation to deal with. In this case, the job losses will be as bitterly felt as they were at MG Rover, but at least we have until the end of 2007 to find alternative jobs for the people concerned.
Lord Berkeley: My Lords, can my noble friend also ensure that the action group looks at transport within Cornwall? With diversification and new job opportunities, which we all hope will come, it is terribly important that people can get around within the county. One of the road schemes near St Austell proposed in the latest round has, I gather, been put on ice, and I hope that that decision can be reversed. Is my noble friend also aware that, when the new First Great Western franchise for passenger trains was let this summer, many cuts to local services were proposed, not only on the branch lines but in commuter services on the main Cornwall line? Can the Government see whether some of those can be reinstated, so that local train services can help people going to new jobs?
Lord Sainsbury of Turville: My Lords, I agree that in these circumstances transport is extremely important. The decision on the deprioritisation of the St Austell to Bodmin—A391—road improvement was taken on
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European Organization for Nuclear Research (Privileges and Immunities) Order 2006
11.34 am
The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State, Foreign and Commonwealth Office (Lord Triesman): My Lords, I beg to move the Motion standing in my name on the Order Paper.
Moved, That the draft order laid before the House on 25 May be approved [29th Report from the Joint Committee] [Considered in Grand Committee on 4 July].—(Lord Triesman)
On Question, Motion agreed to.
Legal Aid
11.35 am
The Secretary of State for Constitutional Affairs and Lord Chancellor (Lord Falconer of Thoroton): My Lords, with the leave of the House I should like to make a Statement on the independent report of the noble Lord, Lord Carter, into the procurement of legal aid, which has been published today and copies of which have been placed in the Libraries of both Houses. A joint consultation paper on the proposals of the noble Lord has been issued simultaneously by the Department for Constitutional Affairs and the Legal Services Commission, and copies have been placed in the Libraries.
The report is the product of a year of engagement between a number of different stakeholders. Government, the Legal Services Commission, the Law Society, the Bar Council, the judiciary, individual practitioners and others, have all played a full part in the discussions that have led to the noble Lord’s recommendations. In his report, he identifies the importance of a publicly funded legal service to ensure proper access to justice for those in need of advice and representation, and for those charged with criminal offences. He rightly identifies the high quality of our legal system.
In a time of finite public resources and ever-increasing pressure on the legal system, it is vital that we review our arrangements for the provision of legal aid. For some time, under successive Governments, they have not fully been serving either the public or the clients of the system. Changing the way in which we purchase legal advice services is a key element of our desire both to reform the criminal justice system and to provide better outcomes in civil and family justice. I know from experience the difficulty in balancing all the competing factors to ensure that legal aid is fair to the vulnerable, fair to taxpayers, fair to defendants and fair for practitioners.
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The noble Lord, Lord Carter, has concluded that fundamental change must be made in the way in which legal aid services are procured so that clients have access to good quality legal advice and representation; a good quality, efficient supplier base thrives and remains sustainable; taxpayers and the Government receive value for money; and the justice system is more efficient, effective and simple. He recommends a new system for the provision of criminal legal aid where the professions ensure proper quality control over their members; where lawyers are, as much as possible, paid on the basis of the completion of the case rather than for the number of hours they have worked; and where they are encouraged to be as efficient as possible by being able to compete for work on the basis of price.
The noble Lord, Lord Carter, has proposed that the criminal legal aid market should be restructured alongside his suggested timetable in the following way: April 2007 should see the introduction of a new fixed-fee scheme in police stations; it should also see changes to standard fees for magistrates’ court cases, changes to the advocates graduated fee scheme in the Crown Court and an extension of the graduated fee scheme to litigators in the Crown Court. For very high cost cases, the Legal Services Commission should introduce an enhanced quality threshold and use an increased level of in-house legal expertise and closer management to bring greater control over the individual case contracting regime. He proposes that that be achieved by the end of the financial year 2007-08 through the Legal Services Commission contracting solely with a panel of suppliers.
Panel membership would be determined through the demonstration of the appropriate level of quality as well as competition. Price competition should be introduced from 2009, with quality-assured suppliers bidding for multiple units of cases in police stations, which they would usually then take through to the magistrates' and/or the Crown Courts, depending on where the case ended. The transition to a more market-based approach comes alongside changes to the regulation of legal services, as outlined in the draft Legal Services Bill. Taken together, that will mean change for the profession: a degree of re-structuring for solicitors and barristers alike.
Those changes must be managed in a way that ensures continuing quality and choice for the public while giving the professions time and, where appropriate, support, to adjust to the new model. The noble Lord recognises the need to ensure the providers of legal services continue to serve BME communities and those in less densely populated and rural areas. He strongly acknowledges that one size does not fit all and he makes detailed proposals to ensure the continued improved provision of high-quality legal services for allthose communities. His report contains detailed recommendations that will help us devise a criminal justice system that the public expects: one that is simple, speedy and makes best use of summary justice.
On civil and family legal aid, the report provides for a more efficient, client-focused service, concentrating on meeting differing local needs. The noble Lord suggests that this will be achieved through the establishment of community legal advice centres and
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New forms of contracting are expected to promote greater links between civil suppliers and, where possible, with family law suppliers, so that clusters of problems can be dealt with earlier and more effectively to avoid the risk that they multiply and lead to people falling into the social exclusion trap.
The Legal Services Commission also proposes to move to fixed and graduated fees from April 2007 for a wide variety of civil and family work and for most immigration work. This will promote and reward the most effective working by suppliers. The consultation document published alongside the noble Lord’s report contains full details.
The noble Lord, Lord Carter, estimates that if these reforms had been fully in place in 2005-06, criminal legal aid spending would have been £100 million lower, and this does not take account of the potential further savings from best-value tendering. In addition, a greater proportion of legal aid would have been spent on civil and family matters. By the end of the implementation period, because the reforms will also control unit costs far better than many elements of the current scheme, spending will be lower than it would be without the changes proposed.
I also welcome and accept the recommendation of the noble Lord, Lord Carter, for better management and control of spending, including through greater transparency and shared problem-solving between the Department for Constitutional Affairs, the Legal Services Commission, other government departments and the professions.
In conclusion, the Government strongly welcome my noble friend’s findings and we have today issued a consultation paper, which I encourage everyone to respond to. I look forward to the challenges ahead and to working with all stakeholders and the Legal Services Commission. The dedication and commitment of those commissioners and staff will be critical to success. Finally, I am immensely grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Carter, for his work. He has provided a blueprint for the future.
11.42 am
Lord Kingsland: My Lords, I am most grateful to the noble and learned Lord the Lord Chancellor for making this Statement. Like the noble Lord, Lord Goodhart, I received it only a short time ago. It may be that the noble Lord, Lord Goodhart, reads more quickly than I do, or at least absorbs information more efficiently, but I have not had the chance to take in everything that the noble Lord, Lord Carter, said, so what I am about to say should be seen in that context.
First, will the noble and learned Lord the Lord Chancellor say a little more about how these proposals, and his response to them, fit in with the development of the legal services Bill, which is in pre-legislative review and is soon to emerge? Plainly, how the noble
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The second point I would like the noble and learned Lord the Lord Chancellor to reflect on aloud this morning is how he sees this new market-based approach squaring with the quality-of-service approach that he also lauded. Plainly, we all want to see legal services that are as cost efficient as possible, but it is not desirable for that to be at the cost of the quality of provision. This is not an easy matter to resolve, and I am certainly not going to pretend to your Lordships' House that I know the answer; but we have to grapple with it, as do those at the coalface deciding where the money should be spent and where it should not. I would like to see these ideas in a little more detail than they have been in the report by the noble Lord, Lord Carter. In saying that, I make no criticism of the noble Lord, because he clearly had a very wide range of issues to consider.
One of the possible consequences of the Government adopting the noble Lord’s proposals is a reduction in the number of solicitors’ firms providing legal aid, although we hope the quality of advice will rise. Has the noble and learned Lord the Lord Chancellor taken into account the likely geographical impact of this on the provision of legal service throughout the country? I can see that it is highly desirable to focus on those firms that have the appropriate expertise, but this may mean some firms will disappear altogether from quite large towns. In deciding which solicitors’ firms will receive legal aid contracts in criminal matters, will a geographical criterion also be applied by the DCA and the Legal Services Commission? In the context of magistrates’ courts, both the noble and learned Lord the Lord Chancellor and his predecessor, the noble and learned Lord, Lord Irvine, have always stressed the importance of local justice locally delivered. I respectfully suggest that it is desirable to have legal aid advice locally delivered.
One of the difficulties of fulfilling the task the noble Lord, Lord Carter, was entrusted with is that he has been looking at defence costs without knowing the number of prosecutions with which defence lawyers will be faced. That is particularly true with regard to large prosecutions. It is difficult to deal with legal aid in isolation from the prosecutorial policy of the Crown. It is no good complaining about higher defence costs if more prosecutions take place. Defence costs in criminal cases cannot be approached in total isolation from what is happening on the prosecutorial side.
A good example is the recent Jubilee Line case, about which, noble Lords will recall, your Lordships had a debate about a fortnight ago. The noble and learned Lord the Attorney-General accepted, frankly and openly, that the reason the case had gone on so long was entirely due to mistakes made by the prosecution. We will get a grip on defence costs in these more expensive cases only if we also get a grip on the way prosecutions are conducted in those cases. I am sure the noble and learned Lord understands the point very well; but when seeking to determine how to progress the Carter report, I respectfully suggest that he bear that factor in mind.
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One of the most important reasons the Jubilee Line case took a long time was the use of the offence of conspiracy to defraud. That is a notoriously vague offence in criminal law. It is ill defined, and frequently gives rise to many additional evidential requirements. In the assessment of Mr Wooler, who conducted the Jubilee Line inquiry, it added about 15 more months to the case. The Law Commission, in its report on the reform of the offence of fraud, recommended that conspiracy to defraud should be abolished. I know the noble and learned Lord the Attorney-General is reluctant to accept that. We have had a debate about it in another context, and I do not intend to dilate on the topic further today. I would be most interested to know, though, and perhaps this could be done by sampling from a few court cases, just how much time the addition of the conspiracy to defraud offence has actually added to those trials. We know the answer in the Jubilee line case; but I suspect that such an analysis will produce the same evidence in other cases.
The noble and learned Lord will well rememberthe circumstances in which he commissioned the report—in the context of the public scandal about the amount of money expended in high-cost cases. Fifty per cent of defence expenditure costs in the Crown Court goes on 1 per cent of the cases held there. That, in absolute terms, amounts to over £100 million. With great respect to the author of the report, what he concludes is the least satisfactory part of it.
In paragraph 97, he suggests certain changes but admits that they would save only 5 per cent of total expenditure. He says, in paragraph 98:
even after the reforms that he suggests—
He goes on to speculate on why that aspect of legal aid is still totally out of control. In paragraph 99, he says:
“This results partly from the established policy of each contract manager negotiating independent of what is agreed on other contracts on the same case and not being aware of the case management strategy being used by other defence teams”.
He then goes on, rather despairingly, to suggest that perhaps the only way of resolving this problem is to have an overall budget for these high-cost cases.
The noble and learned Lord’s success or failure in this matter will, as he will know, depend on the extent to which he gets to grips with high-cost cases. I suggest that, on this crucial issue, the noble Lord, Lord Carter, has taken him no further and that he will need to think again about what needs to be done. The noble Lord, Lord Carter, has suggested that there should be an overall financial limit, but this could not work unless you also had overall control of the number of prosecutions brought. How can you possibly make an overall financial limit work in high-cost cases if you do not know how many high-cost prosecutions there will be?
It seems, therefore, that the only way forward is to have very strict cost controls on each case. I am not sure how that would work for solicitors in the light of the other changes that the noble and learned Lord proposes. Indeed, we do not yet know how any of
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11.54 am
Lord Goodhart: My Lords, the noble Lord, Lord Carter of Coles, is to be congratulated on producing a very full report in very reasonable time. Like the noble Lord, Lord Kingsland, I have not yet had an opportunity to read it, but I will do so rapidly and with considerable interest.
It is quite clear from the Statement and from brief consideration of the executive summary of the report that the report will lead to very important changes in the legal aid system. Indeed, together with the Clementi report, it will lead to fundamental changes in the legal profession, perhaps to an even greater extent than with the Access to Justice Act 1999.
We recognise that the increasing costs of legal aid have been and continue to be a real problem. We accept that civil legal aid must be cash limited and that procedures such as conditional fee agreements should be introduced, although there are aspects of that case which need to be looked at again. Like the noble Lord, Lord Kingsland, we also accept that very high-cost cases take far too great a proportion of the criminal legal aid budget and are altogether too expensive.
The report proposes that, in effect, much legal aid should be put out to tender. We do not object to that in principle, but will those granting legal aid be able adequately to take into account the quality of services? The Government have said in the Statement that they will do that, but we need ensure that it happens and to strike the right balance between quality and cheapness. What is needed here is value for money, not something cheap and nasty.
I have some concern over the proposal to place a limitation on the number of criminal cases that can be dealt with by firms as a result of client choice. Are the Government satisfied that the new system will put an end to the problems of legal aid deserts? Legal advice centres and networks can play an important part but could pose a serious threat to the availability of general legal services in the locality. A further important issue is whether the Government are prepared to ring-fence civil legal aid. It is wholly wrong that increases in criminal and immigration legal aid should mean a reduction in civil legal aid—including family legal aid—which deals with cases of the utmost importance to many claimants.
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