Good morning.
I am delighted to be here today.
I would like:
to offer some indication of where Government thinking has reached in this area
but also - and very importantly to me - to listen, and to listen hard, to what you have to say.
Because I know I owe you a debt. I want to start out by paying an unreserved tribute to you: to the many dedicated and conscientious lawyers who carry out legal aid work. We in the Government - me in particular - value what you are doing and I intend to ensure that we continue to support what is a vital public service to help those whose fundamental rights are at risk, or who suffer from social exclusion.
You know much better than me that although it is absolutely vital, legal aid does not cover popular or glamorous areas of law. Clients may well be difficult: drugged, drunk, violent, incoherent, frightened or disturbed. The public and media may confuse the exercise of professional duty with support for the unsupportable. Hours may be unsociable, as lawyers who attend police stations late at night will tell. It is certainly a vital job. But it's a tough and very often misjudged job too.
The popular understanding of legal aid has been formed by a number of elements:
by press exploitation of high profile - and often, in the media's terms, highly unworthy - cases
by a lack of appreciation of why legal aid is needed in crime and other areas
and by a willingness on the part of at least some of the media to characterise all lawyers as greedy or unscrupulous.
You know, and I know, that there is a different story to legal aid in this country. That's the story you tell, in the work you do, every day. And that's what I want to concentrate on with you this morning.
You and I both know there are problems, real problems, within the legal aid system. I know you're trying to wrestle with them, as I am. That's reflected in the debate that is the subject of today's conference, and in the focus of a considerable amount of work within my own Department.
So today I really want to do just three things:
I want to set out what we believe is the story of legal aid: how we've got to where we are today
I want to say something about the problems facing legal aid: I know they're real
and I want to say, as much as I'm able to today, where I think we're going with legal aid: or at least an indication of the direction of travel.
I am a passionate believer in legal aid. It is unquestionably at the heart of our legal system. It ensures that justice is done and that the courts can work efficiently.
The great post-war Atlee government wanted to see education and health available to all. That vision is still what the Government wants today. But Atlee wanted as well to see justice for all. We share that ambition - and I believe that legal aid is central to that.
I know I don't need to remind anyone here of the history, but as you know the proposals for a system of legal aid were first put forward by the Rushcliffe Report in 1945 and enacted in the Legal Aid and Advice Act of 1949.
In their conception, the founding principles of the legal aid system were prosaically simple. It was decided that a "judicare system" should be set up whereby lawyers would cater for the needs of the poor as well as the rich. The poor would be able to receive legal advice so as to prosecute and defend a legal right and both counsel and solicitors would benefit from fair remuneration for their services.
These principles were right then. Those principles I believe are right now.
What happened to legal aid in practice after its foundation and establishment was that throughout the 1960s and 1970s, legal aid expanded considerably. By the 1980s and the 1990s, rising costs had begun to be an issue for the Government. Expenditure in the period between 1985-1986 was £319 million. By 1995-1996, the figure had risen to £1.4 billion.
Our budget this year is some £2 billion in resource terms. That's a big bill, by any standards - £500 million more than in 1997/98 when the Government came to power. Expenditure has increased by 28% whilst inflation was only 12% in the same period.
Governments of different political persuasions have made and implemented proposals to tackle this rate of increase and to seek to improve legal aid.
For our part, in we passed the Access to Justice Act. We have to guard against complacency, but to a large extent, I believe, in any balance sheet-style assessment, the Act has been successful:
The encouragement of Conditional Fee Agreements has unquestionably extended access to justice.
We have extended the scope of Legal Help and the role of the not-for-profit sector.
We have introduced the enormously successful "Just ask" website .
We have made sure that legal aid resources are concentrated in those areas which most relate to social exclusion.
The Legal Services Commission measures the outcome of their cases and I am very heartened to note that there has been a substantial improvement in cases with a positive outcome for the client.
The work we have done with the Community Legal Service partnerships to get better focused use of money at the local level and to encourage better referral mechanisms has also in my view helped immensely.
On this basis, I think it is fair to say that the government has been fairly unstinting in its support for legal aid - both financially and in more innovative policy terms. Nevertheless, we must make sure that we concentrate on the original mission of legal aid. So we are looking at legal aid in three major areas:
what we might best characterise as value for money
the procurement of legal services
and the relationship with you the providers of the Legal Services
Firstly, value for money. It scarcely needs to be said that the government has a clear responsibility to ensure that we are getting the best possible return for our investment in the legal aid system and that we seek to minimise our transaction costs. In order to develop more robust controls and gain some much needed certainty in the market, we need a far better understanding of why the average cost per case has spiralled in the way it has.
So we are looking carefully at the legal processes which, to a considerable extent, drive legal aid costs. Here, rightly, we must have wider aims than simply reducing costs. But very often wider policy aims - such as increasing the number of effective criminal trials or speeding up public family law cases - march hand in hand with controlling legal aid expenditure or expenditure in the wider criminal justice system. could I mention in particular the Effective Trial Management Project and the Protocol on Public Law Children Act Cases in the Family field. The profession is co-operating on both of these.
It is also important that we rigorously cost all policy change within Government so that we can estimate and fund consequential legal aid costs. This will not be a public process. But you could have my assurance that I will pursue this with vigour. The legal aid budget cannot indefinitely absorb the knock-on effects of changes in the law across government.
In asylum David Blunkett and I are examining the process before an appeal can be lodged to see whether it can be further improved, in particular whether the role legal aid is playing is appropriate. The cost of asylum legal aid has more than doubled over the past three years, from £81.3m in 2000-2001 to £174.2m in 2002-03. This rate of increase is far in excess of the increase in the number of asylum seekers over the period.
As you will know, we have already taken a number of steps to improve the asylum legal aid system. We have introduced representation at the appeal stage. We have reduced substantially the abuse of judicial review. The Legal Services Commission (LSC) is working to eliminate poor quality and overcharging lawyers from the system.
But given the continuing rise in costs we need to examine, and re-examine, how we can increase cost-effectiveness as well as maintain a good service. It is as part of that process that the Department launched its " Public Consultation on proposed changes to publicly funded immigration and asylum work" in June 2003. As you know, there has been some comment about our proposals.
We have listened carefully to what the professions and others have said about our consultation paper. We received over 260 responses, varying from short comments to substantial submissions. We are very grateful to all of those who responded to that very important consultation paper.
What has been clear has been the dedication and commitment of those working with asylum seekers. While we recognise that, we also have a wider duty to the taxpayer to ensure that all legal aid money is spent in the most effective way. To be true to the founding principles, we must ensure that money spinning cases which do not promote justice do not crowd out properly run cases which deliver help to the genuinely needy. Most of you favoured our accreditation proposals and the proposal for a unique identifying number, subject to a number of technical concerns. But many thought that our proposals for rigid caps were not correctly pitched. We have reached no definite conclusions on that consultation but, as my ministerial colleague in the DCA, David Lammy, indicated in his evidence to the Select Committee on the DCA on Tuesday, we now favour a much more flexible regime.
Secondly, the complex area of procurement of legal services - an area in which we are seeking to make substantial progress over the coming months.
Many of you will be aware that my Department, in collaboration with the Legal Services Commission and with the help of two sets of highly respected, independent consultants, are carrying out a major review of supply, demand and purchasing arrangements.
The objective of this Review is to substantially improve our understanding of the potential demand for publicly funded legal services over the course of the next five years, and to assess the corresponding levels of supply needed to meet that demand and to establish with certainty the costs, fees and conditions necessary to attract and maintain a well-qualified and high quality group of legal aid lawyers. The Review will also examine carefully all the options for purchasing these services in the most effective way.
The Government is not immune to the concerns of legal aid lawyers around the issues of supply but I am optimistic that the results of this work will provide us with a far better understanding of exactly where the shoe is pinching.
This is an open process in which a large number of legal aid solicitors have already participated and members of the professions will shortly be invited to take part in a stakeholders seminar to discuss some of these issues in more detail. The review should be complete by the end of the year.
And the third area we are looking at - and it may be the most contentious - is the LSC's relationship with you.
We have a new and innovative Chief Executive at the Legal Services Commission - Clare Dodgson. She is organising the contract round for next April, and she will be using the existing pattern of contracts to drive up quality and prevent excessive cost. I understand that she will in particular limit contracts to those with a proven track record, that is Category 1 and Category 2 suppliers. Category 3 suppliers will have the opportunity of a second audit but those who cannot reach the higher standard will be excluded. In asylum there will also be a competition on the basis of quality. But I know she is also keen to reduce bureaucracy - which I know is a concern to many of you - wherever it is possible to do so and to reduce inflation in costs.
Last, the LSC are looking at innovative ways of delivering services. Telephone services, for example, hold out the prospect in some areas of law of being a highly acceptable way of reaching our clients and to provide some economies. They are being piloted widely and the LSC will be considering the results of that pilot.
Equally I do not rule out directly employed services. The Public Defender Service has shown that the LSC can successfully deliver an employed service. We cannot yet make an informed judgement on costs. But an employed service may well offer economies when seen as part of the wider criminal justice system. David Lammy and I will judge the result of the pilot on its merits and we will publish the information on which we base our decision.
I've tried this morning to be frank with you about the difficulties facing legal aid. I can't, I'm afraid, say too much to you today about the future. Work is going on, and we will bring forward the results of that work, and any proposals stemming from it, as quickly as we can.
But what I can say about the future is that in the longer term I want to develop further the role of legal aid in tackling social exclusion. There already exists a wealth of evidence which supports the contention that timely intervention on the part of a legal aid lawyer can often make the difference between a manageable debt problem and the usual spiralling cluster of problems around living conditions, mental health and criminality that otherwise seem to follow as an inevitable consequence.
I hope that we are demonstrating that we are listening to and, more importantly, endeavouring to respond to your concerns. It is, after all, you who are best placed to judge the impact of policy on the legal aid system and provide the best intelligence on its achievements and defects. If we are to tackle the challenges that legal aid presents to us all over the coming years, it is exactly this type of information that my officials and I most need.
There is no single blueprint for legal aid change. The geography of legal aid is complex and constantly changing. But against this background, I am determined that we should succeed in repositioning legal aid back under the 'justice for all' banner and that we should regard it as our collective duty to take great care in balancing our unquestionable obligations to the rights of the individual in the criminal law with the equally important needs of the socially excluded.
My final undertaking to you that any change should be well founded and robustly supported by the evidence. We collectively owe it to the client to carefully balance individual rights with social need. In this, David Lammy and I will co-operate closely with you but, as I am sure you will all agree, there can be no standing still.
We all want to see a legal aid system which works - works for you, works for me, but most of all works for the people it's primarily there to help: people in need, people in trouble, people who need help most.
That's what I want my department to focus on across all that it's doing. And that's what I want you, working closely with me and the department, to focus on in providing the best legal aid service we can. I'm determined to achieve that. I'm confident that you are too.