§ Mr. Jim CunninghamTo ask the Parliamentary Secretary, Lord Chancellor's Department what assessment he has made of the impact on litigants involved in expensive, lengthy or complex cases of the introduction of contracting between the Legal Aid Board and legal service providers. [35237]
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§ Mr. HoonContracting is a flexible tool, which will allow the Legal Aid Board to test different arrangements to determine which are most suitable for different types of case. We believe that individual negotiated contracts are likely to prove most appropriate in expensive cases.
§ Mr. Jim CunninghamTo ask the Parliamentary Secretary, Lord Chancellor's Department what steps his Department is planning to concentrate the legal aid budget on promoting access to the judicial system for the poorest and on cases which raise issues of wider public interest. [35236]
§ Mr. HoonWe are consulting on our proposals to begin
to focus on the priority needs of the poor by concentrating legal aid more tightly on cases that cannot be funded in the private sector and which are of high priority;to support cases which have a significant public interest and might otherwise not be brought.These are the first two steps in the Government's plans to modernise legal aid which are set out in the consultation paper, "Access to Justice with Conditional Fees", which was published on 4 March.