HC Deb 29 March 1962 vol 656 cc1699-710

Motion made, and Question proposed, That this House do now adjourn.—[Mr. Whitelaw.]

10.12 p.m.

Mr. Bruce Millan (Glasgow, Craigton)

I am glad to have this opportunity to raise tonight the various happenings with regard to the operation of the Poor's Roll system at Glasgow Sheriff Court, particularly over the last month or so. This is quite a complicated subject, and the time which we have available is limited, but I want nevertheless to give a certain amount of the background of this dispute. Fortunately, there have been developments within the last two or three days which take away some of the seriousness of the situation, but there are a number of important matters which it is still worth while raising and about which I hope to hear the Secretary of State say something.

The principle of giving legal aid in criminal cases to poor people in Scotland is long-established. I will not describe the history because there is not time for that, but immediately before this dispute arose the position was something like this—and I will describe it in respect of the Glasgow Sheriff Court, although with certain differences the same sort of system operated in the other sheriff courts in Scotland: any people who came before the Glasgow Sheriff Court—and large numbers of people go there—had the benefit under the system of a Poor's Roll agent to help him in his defence at the court and also, and this is important, not just at the sheriff court but at any subsequent proceedings in the case.

For example, if a man were remanded, the next time he came before the court the Poor's Roll solicitor who represented him in the first case would in nearly every case represent him again. The same comment applies to such things as applications for bail and proceedings at a higher court. It is a misconception that the only people who have the benefit of the agent under the Poor's Roll system are those who are charged with comparatively trivial offences. Even murder cases, even the more serious capital offences, come under this Poor's Roll system

This system was not essentially something which was a matter of Statute. It had become recognised, during the last few years in particular, that this was something which was done by the solicitors, and at a higher level counsel, in Scotland as a public service. The only contribution which the Government make to this service is a lump sum payment of £8,000 a year. It is agreed by the Law Society, by the Guthrie Committee, which I shall mention later, by the Secretary of State and by everyone else concerned that this payment of £8,000 is a token payment only and represents nothing like the actual cost of running the Poor's Roll system. At the time of the Guthrie Report the Law Society gave an estimate that if a proper system of legal aid were established, the cost would be about £200,000 per annum.

Probably the cost would be considerably more than that. The only payment that has been made to solicitors in Scotland—no payment is made to counsel at all in Poor's Roll work—has been this payment of £8,000 a year. How it works out in Glasgow is that on the Poor's Roll in Glasgow there were twenty-six agents who took one week each for six months, so that each agent had two separate weeks in the year, and for a week's work each agent was paid £30. The £30 covered not only each week's work which he did, but also the other legal work which he had to do in cases that were remanded, cases that went to a higher court, bail applications and applications for medical reports and so on—all the legal work arising out of the cases which he dealt with as a Poor's Roll solicitor.

It is recognised that any payments made are purely token payments, and nothing like cover the actual fees that could be charged by solicitors if they could charge the standard fees. It has been recognised that something had to be done about this. There was, in 1949, the Legal Aid (Scotland) Act, under which it was provided that there should be a legal aid scheme for criminal and civil cases. The Act has been implemented in regard to civil cases, but it has never been implemented for criminal cases. The Law Society has made representations annually to the Secretary of State for Scotland from 1949, and eventually, at the end of 1957, the Guthrie Committee was established, under the chairmanship of Lord Guthrie, to look into the whole question and report. The Report was completed in February, 1960, and was published in May, 1960.

The Report is extremely comprehensive, and goes into considerable detail, but all I need show for my purpose this evening is that it recommended that the principle that legal aid should be extended to criminal cases ought to be accepted. It went on to elaborate an actual, practical working scheme that could be put into operation once the principle had been accepted.

The Secretary of State for Scotland said nothing at all about whether he accepted the principle of the Guthrie Report when it was published in May, 1960. In fact, he said nothing at all about the Guthrie Report until December, 1961. During 1961, there was increasing agitation and pressure by the Law Society as to the attitude of the Secretary of State for Scotland towards the Report, and I myself put Questions down to him in November, 1961, when he said that he was still considering the Report, and had not even come to a conclusion whether to accept the principle or not.

It was only on 9th December last year, seventeen months after the Report had been published, that the Secretary of State said that he accepted in principle the idea that legal aid should be extended to criminal as well as civil cases. It is important to note the date, 9th December, 1961—which was only twelve days before the Glasgow and Dunbartonshire Poor's Roll solicitors gave notice that they would work to rule as from 1st January, 1962. It took this kind of pressure to get the Secretary of State to say that he accepted the Guthrie Report in principle. Following that, the work to rule was called off, but in the two months of January and February, there was very little in the way of developments.

The Secretary of State made no attempt, according to my information. to get round the table with the Law Society to discuss the implications of the Guthrie Report, the question when the legislation might be likely to be introduced or any of the various problems arising out of the Report and the operations of the present legal aid scheme. This was desipte the fact that the Secretary of State knew that the work to rule, as far as Glasgow was concerned, was merely deferred, and has not been completely forgotten. It was only a question of deferring it, and, in fact, the Glasgow solicitors started to work to rule again on 1st March of this year.

What the work to rule involved was simply this. The solicitors said that they would not act for all persons who came before the Sheriff Court but only for those who filled in an affidavit of means proving that they were poor persons rightly eligible for legal aid. The Poor's Roll solicitors continued to be in attendance at the Sheriff Court, providing affidavit forms drawn up by the Law Society in what was thought to be an acceptable manner. But legal aid in the Sheriff Court stopped on 1st March, 1962, because the sheriffs refused to agree that the affidavit was a proper affidavit and in those circumstances no one was willing to bring to the attention of the defendants the fact that there were agents available for their defence if they only took the step of asking for them.

The Procurator-Fiscal refused to do that. I asked the Lord Advocate if he would instruct him to do that and the right hon. and learned Gentleman said that it would not be proper for him to do that. The sheriffs' clerk would not take the action of bringing the matter to the notice of defendants, and neither would the police. The sheriffs-substitute on the bench, although they mentioned the question of legal representation to defendants who had no legal representation, took very good care, as I saw for myself when, with my hon. Friend the Member for Glasgow, Maryhill (Mr. Hannan), I visited Glasgow Sheriff Court a fortnight ago, not to draw the attention of defendants to the fact that there were agents for the poor available there if they would only avail themselves of the opportunity to ask for them.

During that visit to the Glasgow Sheriff Court, I heard about nine or ten cases. In three cases, the defendants were remanded for, among other things, medical reports on their condition. Two of them were illiterate and could not read or write, and obviously could not properly appreciate the charges made against them. All three defendants were remanded for, among other things, reports on their mental condition with the possibility that they would be remanded and compulsorily detained under the mental health legislation. These people had no legal representation at all.

I found the proceedings that morning extremely distasteful, profoundly shocking and unjust to the defendants. In fact, from 1st March to 22nd March, no fewer than 536 defendants in the Glasgow Sheriff Court were unrepresented by solicitors. I dare say that by this time the figure is about 700. That is a shocking figure and a shocking reflection on the way in which these disputes are handled.

Following the Questions in the House which I and some of my hon. Friends asked, the Secretary of State, to his eventual credit, began to take a certain amount of interest in the problem. He went to Glasgow on 24th March and had a meeting with the officials of the Law Society and with the representatives of the agents for the poor in Glasgow. Following that meeting, on Monday, 26th March, the Secretary of State sent a letter to the Law Society, not only saying that he accepted the Guthrie Report in principle, but committing himself, so far as any Secretary of State or Government Minister can, to saying that legislation would be introduced in the 1962–63 Session. There is no absolute commitment—I understand that—but it is a commitment which goes as far as the Government can go.

Because of this, I understand that today there is to be an announcement that the work to rule has been abandoned and that as from next Monday, under a compromise arrangement in which both sides have given way to a certain extent, the sheriff will accept affidavits which he refused to accept three or four weeks ago and the Poor's Roll solicitors made a compromise to get some sort of system working as from next Monday.

The point about the new arrangement is this. It is a strictly temporary one until 31st October. It is obviously conditional on what the Government do about this matter between now and 31st October.

The two things which I wish to say about this whole melancholy business are these. First, it was completely unnecessary. There may have been an element of cussedness in the situation which I saw developing in Glasgow Sheriff Court. I have profound sympathy with the solicitors when I consider how the Secretary of State for Scotland has handled the whole affair. The original delay, the delay in the acceptance of the principle of the Guthrie Report, the delay even after the work to rule had been threatened and called off and the whole handling of the affair, was extremely unfortunate from the point of view of the Secretary of State. He seemed to do everything possible to irritate and annoy these responsible people. It should be pointed out that the unfortunate solicitors in Glasgow had the support throughout of the Law Society of Scotland.

It seems to me that the whole dispute could have been avoided and these 700 or more defendants who have appeared in Glasgow Sheriff Court and who have been completely unrepresented—that is the most disturbing feature of the situation, quite apart from the claims of the solicitors—could have been defended as they have been in the past had the Secretary of State handled the situation in a better way.

Now, a compromise has been reached and we are happy that this has happened. We all hope that it will not be simply a temporary compromise and that something permanently good will come from this whole unhappy affair. I hope that the Under-Secretary will tonight have the grace to apologise for the situation as it developed in the Glasgow Sheriff Court. I hope that he will give a firm promise that something will be done about instituting legal aid for criminal cases in Scotland. It is an important part of our social legislation that we need to consider. This unhappy affair merely emphasises the urgency of the whole matter.

10.27 p.m.

Mr. William Hannan (Maryhill)

By the good grace of my hon. Friend the Member for Glasgow, Craigton (Mr. Millan) and of the Under-Secretary of State, I hope in these few minutes to make a short contribution to the plea which my hon. Friend has made. This unhappy affair has been handled rather as the teachers' dispute was handled. There has been an accumulation of delays and subterfuges instead of meeting a problem which is known inevitably to arise frequently. The difficulty has been contributed to partly because of the increasing number of cases coming into the Glasgow courts of accused persons in custody, and because of the difficulty of agents in ascertaining which of the many people were genuinely in need without having an adequate system of examining the affidavits. Shortly after the dispute arose, the affidavits were not made available. Consequently, people went into court not knowing their legal rights. It is true, as my hon. Friend said, that in court the sheriff asked whether the accused wanted legal aid, but it was not made clear that that aid would be free and would be made available. That incensed me while I was sitting in court.

The numbers have been increasing. In 1961, the number was over 12,000, which was a 20 per cent. increase over 1960. The trouble really stems from the inaction of the Secretary of State concerning the Guthrie Report. He waited 18 months before giving an indication to men who had been straining at the leash and labouring with a great and complex problem.

It is a question not only of the conditions of payment, but of the conditions in which to work. I have never seen such appalling conditions as in the courts in Glasgow, particularly in regard to facilities for children. I am not one who wants the return of the whip. On the other hand, I am not one who wants lush conditions provided for young people who may have offended—these are only people who may be proved guilty—but the conditions are shocking. There is one small room on the first floor where the agents have to interview numerous people. Children have to go down a broad stairway into the basement of the building, which is ill-lit, with cold tiling on the walls, into a room only 8 ft. by 10 ft. for 45 children of tender years, between the ages of eight and sixteen, with one agent in attendance, and, of course, some of the children's officers.

How can people conduct business, and how can young people have any sense of response and even a sense of dignity in situations and conditions such as that?

Here in the very heart of Glasgow, where footsteps on the pavement outside can be heard inside, there are 40 children in a room like a storeroom, and in the corridor one can see the service pipes. It is in that room that children are interviewed. The irony of it is that stored in that room are the ballot boxes for elections in which adults are supposed to cast votes for better and saner conditions. It is in a room like that that our young people are interviewed.

I hope that tonight we shall get an assurance that not only will the Guthrie Report be implemented, but that all these things will be looked at soon.

10.30 p.m.

The Under-Secretary of State for Scotland (Mr. R. Brooman-White)

I differ in emphasis from some of the things which the hon. Members have said, but not very much in substance. I agree that this has been an unhappy sequence of events. I must repudiate the suggestion made that the matter has been handled in such a way as deliberately to be irritating and annoying. There have been misunderstandings. I shall endeavour in a brief time to explain how those misunderstandings arose. I certainly share the hon. Members' hopes that the agreement which, I understand, has been reached today will see the end of this sequence of events.

Let me sketch very briefly the developments to date. In 1949, as has been pointed out, there were the Legal Aid Acts for England and Scotland. The English Act has not run into difficulties simply because on the criminal side it is in the main an adaptation and improvement of previous Acts which made provision for poor persons' defence in the criminal courts. We have run into difficulties in Scotland both because we did not have any such previous Acts dealing with the criminal side of legal aid, and also because the 1949 Act made the mistake of assuming that the legal aid arrangements proposed for civil proceedings would work equally well in the totally different circumstances which arise when a man is accused before a criminal court. The civil arrangements made in the 1949 Act have worked very well since they were introduced in 1950, but as experience was gained—I think the hon. Member for Glasgow, Craigton (Mr. Millan) indicated there was delay in this respect, but there was not—as experience was gained of their operation it has become pretty clear that these provisions in the 1949 Act would not work satisfactorily if they were extended to cover criminal legal aid. This became apparent both to the Scottish Office and to the Law Society for Scotland, and it was for these reasons, with which everybody agreed, that no steps were taken to implement those parts of the 1949 Act extending the legal aid provisions to criminal proceedings.

Instead, the Guthrie Committee was appointed in 1957 to take another look at the Sections of that Act relating to criminal legal aid and to work out how the Act should be amended so as to enable us to establish a legal aid system which would not run into the snags which practical experience has shown lay below the surface of the existing provisions of that Act. In the meantime, it is quite true, as the hon. Members have said, that the pressure of work in the criminal courts had been building up and the strain on the lawyers operating the Poor's Roll had been increased, but the lawyers knew and understood the difficulties of extending the 1949 Act to criminal proceedings. They appreciated the impossibility of meeting those difficulties till the Guthrie Committee reported, and also that after the Report was in the Government's hands it would be necessary for us to have some further consultation with the Law Society, sheriffs, and other people concerned.

It is true, as the hon. Member said, that the first official statement on the Government's position on the Guthrie Report was made in this House in December, 1961, but in the meantime, and apart from the Parliamentary exchanges, we had been in touch with the Law Society, and in August, 1961, my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State met a deputation from that body. At that meeting he offered as an interim measure to double the annual payment made by the Government to give some help to the solicitors who undertake the Poor's Roll work in the sheriff courts. The offer was to raise this sum from £8,000 a year to £16,000 a year, on the understanding that solicitors appointed to be agents for the poor would continue to provide assistance either on the traditional lines or in accordance with modified arrangements introduced by agreement with the judges concerned.

Unfortunately, the Law Society eventually turned down this offer because the Poor's Roll agents did not feel able to accept the conditions attached to it, and from 1st October, 1961, the Glasgow agents started to work to rule to some extent. The first step they took was that they continued as previously to offer their help on a welfare basis to anyone who asked for it, but only at the pleading diet. They declined, however, to appear at any subsequent diet unless an affidavit as to the means of the accused had been produced and examined. This was not satisfactory, but I understand that it did not interfere to any significant extent with the working of the court and until the beginning of this month there was not any serious administrative difficulty.

But at the beginning of this month the agents took a second and more drastic step, which was to decline to appear at all, even at a pleading diet, unless an elaborate procedure set out in the Schedule to the Sheriff Courts Act, 1907, had been followed in full. At this point the complications were felt in their full force, because here the agents came into conflict with the Sheriff of Lanarkshire, for the sheriff does not agree that the procedure of 1907 was ever intended to apply in the criminal courts. He thinks, moreover, that its adoption would disrupt the work of the Glasgow courts.

The House will appreciate that, so far as this impasse was the result of differences between the sheriff and the agents on a point of law or a question of practice in the court, it would have been improper for my right hon. Friend to intervene. But it was clear that in some measure the trouble was due to continuing fears about the Government's intentions on legislation. It is fair to say that the lawyers accepted the fact that legislation was not practicable for this Session. But they were concerned about the lack of any categoric assurance for next Session. My right hon. Friend therefore intervened, as has been said, on Saturday last to give a further explanation. Hon. Members are well aware of the practice of the House in this sort of thing. Precise undertakings as to what is or is not to be contained in the Queen's Speech for any given Session are not given prior to the speech itself. It is not customary to go beyond what my right hon. Friend said in his original parliamentary Answer of 19th December, 1961, namely, that legislation was being prepared.

It is not for me to apportion blame. If there has been misunderstanding, it may be said that in the light of hind sight we should have done more to make the position clear. Equally it might be said that if there had been more foresight, that if the 1949 Act, for which the present Government carries no responsibility, had been drafted a little better, this situation would not have arisen. Anyway, there have been meetings and an exchange of letters and I was glad to see in the Press this morning that the Law Society had stated that it regarded the latest explanations and assurances as entirely satisfactory. I understand that my right hon. Friend's letter has been considered by the Poor's Roll agents in Glasgow and that they intend to issue a statement on the working of the Poor's Roll from now on until the introduction of a legal aid scheme for criminal cases in Scotland. They may already have issued such a statement, but I have no official knowledge of it and, therefore, it would be wrong for me to say more than I have said on that point, except to add that I hope I am not being too optimistic in believing that some suitable arrangements will be made and that this important social service will be continued for some time longer in the traditional manner, or with some minor variation of it, until it becomes possible to introduce a statutory scheme of criminal legal aid financed by the Exchequer.

I hope very much that the difficulties which have arisen in recent months will not obliterate and obscure the fact that for many years the Poor Law Roll lawyers in Scotland have been operating—there may have been differences about how far it was a statutory obligation or not—but what has really in practice been a voluntary effort of welfare work which has been carried on most satisfactorily and which does great credit to the lawyers, to whom I think the community owes a debt of gratitude for rendering this service. We hope that this tradition will be continued until such time as we can bring the position into line with the practice that we want to see observed, the practice recommended in outline by the Guthrie Report—when we can make the necessary emendation of the 1949 Act to get a scheme which will put the system on a proper and up-to-date basis.

The Question having been proposed after Ten o'clock and the debate having continued for half an hour, Mr. DEPUTY-SPEAKER adjourned the House without Question put, pursuant to the Standing Order.

Adjourned at eighteen minutes to Eleven.