Legal Aid, Sentencing and Punishment of Offenders Bill

My Lords, I thank the noble Lord for his reply and what assurances he was able to give—not satisfactory from our point of view, but he gave what assurances he could, particularly about another impact assessment later. I thank in particular the noble Lords, Lord Ramsbotham and Lord Pannick, and the noble Baroness, Lady Prashar, for their support for the amendment and all noble Lords who spoke during this important and interesting debate. Important issues have been raised both here and in Committee, and the House obviously believes that. I am delighted to have so much general support around the House for the amendment, although the Minister insisted that it was unnecessary and misguided. Of course we accept that difficult decisions have to be taken by the Government. The Government think that they will save about £61 million a year, a rough figure, by abolishing legal aid for social welfare law. Our problem—I think it should be one for the House—is: how much are they actually going to save by what they intend to do about the scope of legal aid? We believe—reports suggest that we are right—that other departments will have to pick up the pieces of those cases that would otherwise have been solved or sorted but which will not be because people will not have anywhere to go to get the advice that they get now. The system that works pretty well—not perfectly, but pretty well—will have gone. We believe that the cost to the Government, whichever Government, will be much higher than any savings that the ministry will make. That is why we wanted to know more detail and hoped that the department could help us with more detail about what it believes the costs will be. We believe that the cost to society will be very high indeed. It will not help the Government's deficit cuts plan; it may actually add to it in the end. I know that that is not what the Government intend, but we believe that that may be the consequence, which is why I have raised this issue again this evening. I hope that the Government listened to the 5,000-odd responses to the consultation. As I understand it, 90 per cent of them were opposed to what the Government intended to do, so they may have listened, but not very carefully, I fear. I end by saying that the cuts that the Government have decided to make cut 53 per cent of the social welfare law budget, 27 per cent of the family law budget and 8 per cent of the criminal legal aid budget. Those figures were given by the Government in a Parliamentary Answer in another place last week. They are staggering. Why has the criminal legal aid budget, which is already much the largest, been allowed to escape almost scot-free?