LEGAL ADVICE AND ASSISTANCE (FINANCIAL CONDITIONS) (No. 2) REGULATIONS 1975. (Hansard, 12 May 1975)

§ Lord HAILSHAM of SAINT MARYLEBONE
My Lords, the noble and learned Lord has been discharging the task which fell to me some time ago. On the principle which emerged from the Cross-Benches the other day, I suppose that dog must not eat dog, but there are one or two remarks which I should like to make. The Regulations are necessitated by the growth and rapid accelera 538 tion of inflation. There are occasions when we shall seek to know exactly what is responsible for that acceleration, but I do not think that this is an appropriate occasion. However, the noble and learned Lord must not therefore assume that I am not blaming the Government for it, for very largely I am.
The extent of this munificient increase should, I think, be observed. Legal aid bumps along at the supplementary benefit level, and so does legal advice and assistance. When my young son saw the brief which I had been given for this—and it gave accurately the rise from £450 to £500, or something of the sort, as the level to which you have to go down before you qualify for free legal aid—he said: "I wonder what they think they are talking about, dealing with levels like that." I am bound to say that I did not have any very ready answer. The fact that it is disposable income—and not absolute income—which is in question is something which people might perhaps forget, and it is a qualification which ought to be made to the criticism. But at the end of the day our legal services provide the services free for only a tiny segment of the population, broadly speaking those who are actually on supplementary benefit; and the contributory aid, that is to say, aid partly provided for by the State and partly provided for by contribution from the person's own pocket, is given only, I suppose I must say, to a moderately larger segment of the population.
I think that our scheme for legal aid and for legal advice and assistance is probably in advance of that of a great many other countries. Therefore, one does not want to wear too much sackcloth or pour too many ashes on one's head. But one must remember that these services are really available only to very few people, and above that the litigant has to bear the costs himself unless he can make the unsuccessful party on the other side pay the costs for him, or unless he has some society, insurance, or trade union to stand behind him for the purposes of the litigation, or, of course, in the case of commercial litigation he can charge the Chancellor of the Exchequer by making it a deduction for tax. This is not very satisfactory. It is, of course, true that the 539 noble and learned Lord the Lord Chancellor has described these two general studies which have been put in hand. One deals with what I might call the vertical levels—that is to say, the levels of income and property at which these services become available—and the other deals with the horizontal levels; that is to say, the demands which are made from time to time to increase the range of litigation and the range of services which are available to anybody.
I am not going to press the Government in this connection for expenditure of further public money. We all know only too well the situation which the country is in, and the situation which the noble and learned Lord the Lord Chancellor must be in when he approaches his colleagues for gifts of money for this purpose. I will say to the House only that, sooner or later, my conviction is that legal services which consist in providing complete aid only for those on supplementary benefit or thereabouts, and partial aid only for those in a very small hand above that, are not very satisfactory and in the end somebody will have to introduce a scheme by which legal services are available either by insurance or on a more generous scale. I am not asking for it now. If I were, I should be vulnerable to the criticism that I was asking for expenditure of public money on what is not, perhaps, the most urgent priority, although I must add that legal aid is one of the cheapest of our social services.
Although I am not sure that this would be universally accepted, I would rather see the vertical levels, as I have called them, improved than the horizontal levels —the extension of legal aid and assistance and advice to subjects for which they are not now available. For instance, I should have thought that aid for litigation for libel, slander and that sort of thing was less important than improving the scale of assistance in those fields where legal aid is available. I am afraid that those are not very commendatory words, but they are not intended in any way as criticism of the noble and learned Lord I have no doubt whatever that had thing, been different I should have been doing exactly the same thing in the same set of circumstances. With those not very commendatory words, I must add that I can see no reason whatever for doing other 540 than passing both these sets of Regulations and the Scottish Regulations which go with them.

Lord JANNER
My Lords, may I add one or two words to those of the noble and learned Lord the Lord Chancellor and the noble and learned Lord, Lord Hailsham of Saint Marylebone. There is no doubt in my mind, nor can there be any doubt in the minds of any of your Lordships, that these Regulations ought to be accepted without any difficulty. One experiences the difficulties which occur when people have a case in which they are entitled, according to advice, to succeed—this element is always taken into consideration before legal aid is granted —and then, because they have not the means to carry out the litigation they can take no further steps. There is still much to be done in the direction of assisting prospective or possible litigants in this regard, particularly in these days when inflation is striking at everybody.
I should like to add my thanks to the noble and learned Lord, Lord Hailsham of Saint Marylebone, for his contribution. Of course, the points he has made will have to be examined and the committees which have been set up by the noble and learned Lord the Lord Chancellor will obviously consider them before deciding on their recommendations. I think I am expressing the view of all noble Lords when I say that the proposal put forward by the noble and learned Lord with regard to the committee and the examination that is to take place into the legal aid system is something we commend, and we hope that the results will be coming before us as speedily as possible.

§ The LORD CHANCELLOR
My Lords, I agree that legal aid, advice and assistance are very important social services. Without this there would have been great injustice in the years between the introduction of legal aid by the first post-War Labour Government and the present time. Of course there is much that still needs to be done. In the maiden speech which I had the honour of delivering as Lord Chancellor I referred to the last report I received from the Legal Aid Advisory Committee which pointed to the great difficulty in deprived urban centres of our community where legal advice is not available.
541 There are not enough solicitors, for various reasons, and the dramatic way in which young people have taken it upon themselves to set up law centres in towns, the extension by the Law Society itself of its willingness to see that paid solicitors are made available for the granting of legal advice, and the continuity of availability of advice in that way, are extremely important. The extent to which that needs to be extended and where it should be extended is something which I think to be of great importance. In the end, it may well turn out to be more important than the provisions for raising the scales—the vertical aspect of the problem to which the noble and learned Lord referred. With regard to that, it is because there are others than the learned son of the noble and learned Lord, Lord Hailsham, who are raising the same question that I have asked my Advisory Committee to examine, as a matter of urgency, whether we have been approaching this question of legal aid on the right principle so far as financial contribution and eligibility are concerned.
In reference to the sordid question of finance, which is unhappily inescapable, the House may like to know that this year we shall be spending the best part of £35 million on the provision of legal aid, advice and assistance. It is certainly not a negligible sum and, if I may say so, I think that the noble and learned Lord, Lord Hailsham, was right in indicating, as I think he did, that probably our provision of assistance in this field is the best in the world. One does not like to make claims like that, because one does not know how long it can last, but as at present advised we have certainly made it a point, and succeeding Administrations have done so, to see that this vital social service does not die of starvation.