The government will provide £20m to help support not-for-profit advice centres hit by planned legal aid cuts, Justice Minister Kenneth Clarke announced yesterday.
During the second reading debate on the Legal Aid, Sentencing and Punishment of Offenders Bill, the justice secretary also indicated the he may look again at the issue of referral fees.
Defending his plans to remove 13 areas from the scope of legal aid, including most private family law cases, clinical negligence, non-discrimination employment cases, immigration and welfare benefits, Clarke said: ‘No government looks to tackle legal aid lightly, but the system as it stands is obviously unaffordable.'
Clarke said he was not prepared to compromise on access to justice for the protection of fundamental human rights, but said the current legal aid system encourages people to bring cases to court that could be better dealt with in other ways.
‘Our priority is cases where people’s life or liberty is at stake, where they are at risk of serious physical harm or immediate loss of their home, or where their children may be taken into care,’ he said.
Clarke added that the bill establishes an exceptional funding scheme for cases excluded from legal aid where the failure to provide support would be likely to result in breach of the individual’s right to legal aid.
He said the proposals had been modified to take into account responses to the original consultation.
In the debate that followed his speech, in response to questions from other MPs, Clarke also said he would ‘consider’ the issue of referral fees.
Clarke was responding to concerns raised by Liberal Democrat Sir Alan Beith over the 'scandal' of referral fees and the lack of any mention of them in the bill.
Clarke said the government had not dealt with the parts of Lord Jackson's proposals covering referral fees because of the Legal Services Board's review of them.
'We now have its report and the under-secretary of state for justice and I are considering referral fees,' he said.
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