My Lords, we now move on to group four on legal aid. Again, I express our gratitude to the Minister, and to the noble Lord, Lord Sharpe, for his engagement with us on these provisions. Nevertheless, in spite of one welcome
concession, to which I will turn, we oppose in principle the Bill’s proposals to exclude access to legal aid for those previously convicted of terrorist offences, however minor, subject only to the time and age conditions set out in the Bill. Legal aid, restricted as it might already be, is a right that we enjoy as citizens, and it is wrong simply to exclude that right for anyone convicted of a terrorist offence, however minor, whether or not the legal aid sought has any connection with the previous conviction. At least in relation to damages in the last group, the Government made the concession in Amendment 169, as we have heard, that, for the power to reduce damages to be exercised, there would have to be some connection between the past terrorist activity and the Crown’s wrongful conduct complained of in the proceedings. Here, no such connection is necessary before the exclusion of legal aid kicks in.
All we have from the Government in this group is an exception in Amendment 186 and its associated amendments for cases where an applicant for legal aid is the victim of domestic abuse. That is, of course, important, and it is welcome, but it is based on no discernible principle at all. If the victims of domestic violence should be entitled to legal aid, why not the victims of human trafficking, which, we observe, may well have led them into terrorist activity in the first place? Why not the victims of sexual offences? These two examples are the genesis of Amendments 186A and 186B in my name and the name of my noble friend Lady Ludford.
There are many examples of other cases where legal aid ought to be available, regardless of past convictions: family cases involving children, housing cases, Equality Act cases, and eligible cases of applications for judicial review. It is simply no answer for the Government to say that exceptional case funding remains available. The criteria for exceptional case funding are very restrictive. Broadly, they apply where convention rights are said to be infringed—principally in family, housing or benefits cases. There are very difficult hurdles to surmount before exceptional case funding is given, and there is no promise by the Ministry of Justice to make that funding more widely available.
In any case, the Government are trying to make legal aid more difficult to obtain for past terrorist offenders. It is a nonsense for them now to claim, and then rely on that claim, that it is not all that bad because exceptional case funding will make it easier for the very people they are trying to exclude from the availability of legal aid. So we put down Amendments 185 and 187 based on principle, and it is exactly the principle the Government conceded in the last group in relation to damages reduction: that legal aid would not be excluded in cases where there was no link—which we have called “no relevant factual connection”—between the past terrorist offence of which the applicant had been convicted and the current application for legal aid. I have invited the Minister and the Government to accept that principle. Were it accepted, we would not press these amendments to a vote because, although these clauses would still be unacceptable, much of the sting would be removed from them. In the letter from the noble Lord to which I alluded earlier, those amendments have not yet been accepted. I invite the noble Lord to reconsider that.
We also support Amendment 188 in the names of the noble Lords, Lord Pannick and Lord Carlile of Berriew, and my noble friend Lady Ludford, restricting the exclusion of legal aid to cases where an offender has been sentenced to more than seven years for the relevant terrorist offence. At least those are serious terrorist offences—that is not a limitation in the Bill as currently drafted.
I regret that we cannot see the benefit of Amendment 188A, put down yesterday by the noble Lord, Lord Ponsonby, on behalf of the Labour Party, after what must have been weeks of thought. It seeks a review of the impact of Clause 89 on offenders sentenced to a non-custodial sentence. The review sought is very limited and does not address the flawed principle of the proposal or its application. We will stick to our principled amendments, and I beg to move.
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