Legal Reform (Hansard, 1 April 1998)

§ Mr. Austin Mitchell (Great Grimsby)

I beg to move, That leave be given to bring in a Bill to constitute a national community legal service; to create a right to legal services and legal representation; to establish a legal service of employed lawyers and legal advisers throughout England and Wales under the superintendence of a legal services commission; to set up a Ministry of Justice; to modernise the judiciary, legal services and the legal professions; to curtail the power of courts martial; and for related purposes.

I must emphasise that the Bill has nothing to do with the Lord Chancellor or any problems that he may have had, and I deprecate the media's efforts to make an association between it and the Lord Chancellor.

The Bill is concerned with the gap that is emerging between the people and the law. They need the law—it empowers them, and they need it to serve their purposes in all sorts of roles, ranging from employment, consumer and domestic affairs to the assertion of their rights against big organisations. They need the law more and more, but are less and less able to afford it, because, with constant escalation of costs, it is pricing itself out of the range of ordinary people. Any cut in public provision through cuts in legal aid, which seems to be available primarily to a few millionaires and to people on benefit, will make that situation far worse.

The problem that we face and that my Bill attempts to solve is how to provide a popular community legal service that is efficient, cheap and available, like the health service, to people as they need it. I propose to solve the problem by enacting a right to representation and by providing that representation through a public service of paid solicitors and barristers. That is the most efficient and cost-effective way of providing legal services, in competition with private practices, which would continue to serve the people as before.

The service would be established in law shops in each community, based on the law centres, which have done such successful work, but which now face drastic cuts in their services. High street law shops would provide a type of citizens advice bureau service to channel people to the advice service or legal service that they needed. That could be for civil or criminal matters. I hope that the criminal service of the law shops would grow as it developed into a public defender service, which we need in this country. It is the most efficient way of providing criminal law services to the mass of people in an urban society in which there is sufficient concentration and throughput of people.

I intend to finance the structure out of the money currently devoted to legal aid—£1.4 billion or £1.5 billion—plus fees in proportion to ability to pay, and local government grants to improve the service of the law shops in their area. The private sector would compete by charging contingency fees, which the Bill allows, and conditional fees, which the Government propose, and by cutting out restrictive practices, especially those at the Bar, which amplify the costs of legal services to everyone. I want to create competition to serve. That is the only way in which we can provide the service to the people. There would be two structures and people would choose which structure could best help them. That would improve the service in both sectors. The private sector would give 1263 estimates as part of its competitiveness, exhibit charges in solicitors' offices, develop computer services and attempt to serve people more effectively than it has done until now.

The whole structure would be supervised by a legal services commission—an independent body that would provide finance for the service, so that it was independent of political control, and ensure that the service was up to standard. It would be backed by community legal councils rather like community health councils, supervising local provision of legal services in the community.

My other reforms are structural reforms of legal services. They are not dictated by any news items about the Lord Chancellor. Most of them come from the Labour party 1992 election manifesto and from work done by the Legal Action Group in the past decade. Those are proposals for which I and my hon. Friends have argued for the past decade.

The office of Lord Chancellor is in a sense a mediaeval relic, ripe for the modernisation that the Labour party is undertaking in so many other sectors of government. His three-in-one role could perhaps be performed by the Almighty, but it is something of a difficult role for a mere mortal, which I understand that the Lord Chancellor is. I propose to take away judicial appointments and set up a judicial appointments and training commission, responsible for the selection and training of judges. We need a judicial service that is more representative of the whole community. That would not be politicisation. Judges are, in effect, already political figures, in that their politics range from right to extreme right to lunatic right. The system of training and appointment would make them better trained and more representative.

I would also set up a Ministry of Justice, with a Minister here in the House of Commons and answerable to it. Here is where the problems and grievances of the 1264 people are raised and where complaints about the adequacy of structures and their operation need to be addressed. The Minister of Justice would also be answerable to a Select Committee of the House of Commons for performing the brief of modernising the whole system and ensuring that it serves the purposes of the people.

My Bill is a modest Bill. It sets out the framework of a modernised legal service, which we cannot achieve or provide through a programme of piecemeal cuts that is Treasury driven and designed to save money at the expense of unbalancing the legal system against the people if those cuts go through. We want a community service that comes from an employed public service framework competing with the private sector to serve the people, so that the people are empowered by the law and not deprived of it and so that that service industry serves the interests of the people and not its own pecuniary self-interest. I commend the Bill to the House.