final words from lord mcnally on legal aid cuts

at the recent All Party Parliamentary Group meeting on legal aid (http://www.appg-legalaid.org/), Lord McNally - whose legal aid brief passed in the reshuffle to Shailesh Vara - had this to say re social welfare law -

Lord Phillips of Sudbury noted that the advice sector offered crucial frontline services. He asked Lord McNally what the government’s latest thinking was on preserving and expanding the sector.

Lord McNally replied that there had been a long discussion on this. One of the things to be faced was that advice agencies could not be protected any more that local authorities or central government departments. Large amounts of government money had been spent on assisting the advice sector. For example it had recently been given tranches of £100 million and £60 million. The government had challenged the advice sector to restructure and make cost-effective use of resources. As with the legal aid programme itself, the advice sector had been under financial scrutiny. It was an important part of justice to which the government had already given significant help.

Lord Phillips noted that Citizens’ Advice Bureaux were already manned mainly by volunteers. The gains far outweighed the costs of running the service. He asked whether the government had looked at the costs downstream of citizens not getting proper initial advice. Had any attempt been made to quantify this?

Lord McNally replied that some academic might do this but this was not how government worked. Each department was given a budget and had to work within it. Lord McNally said there may be knock-on costs but it was not for the legal aid budget to consider these: there needed to be wider debates.

Yvonne Fovargue MP said that a lot of frontline services had already gone. She noted the huge success rate of tribunals in overturning welfare decisions. What would happen when people could no longer get advice? Had there been an impact assessment?

Lord McNally said that he would be meeting with Iain Duncan Smith to discuss welfare. The current system, where tribunals catch any flawed decisions, was not ideal. When faced with making legal aid cuts, the hard decision had been taken that welfare benefits were not as essential to a person’s wellbeing as other things such as their liberty. In a recession, the cuts would hurt. Within the Ministry of Justice’s terms of reference, Lord McNally and his team felt that they had got it right. He also wondered whether any other party would make any pledges to reverse the cuts. In the current climate he considered this unlikely.

More @ http://www.appg-legalaid.org/images/29october.pdf

“You’re starving you say? Ungrateful wretches; don’t you realise that you are FREE?”

Lord McNally then left for a light lunch, which cost exactly the same as a jobseeker gets in a week.

Bah.