Kate Pasfield, Nimrod Ben-Cnaan and Sarah Matthews.

Q68 The Chair: Welcome to this meeting of the House of Lords Constitution Committee. Today we are hearing from Kate Pasfield, the Director of Legal Aid at the Legal Aid Practitioners Group, Nimrod Ben-Cnaan, the Head of Policy at the Law Centres Network, and Sarah Matthews, the Senior Strategic Lead for Business Development at Citizens Advice. You are all extremely welcome.

We have various members who have questions that they want to ask and we will have a good question and answer session. There are three of you so we do not need you all to answer every question if you are going to say the same thing, but if you are not going to say the same thing, please come in and give us a view about what it is that you want to say.

My first question is a general question that you each might like to take a view on, which is your assessment of the state of the rule of law in the United Kingdom. You might want to expand on how you think it is understood and how the rule of law is carried out by the people who are most responsible for it. Who would like to start off?

Sarah Matthews: I am quite happy to start. Thank you for your welcome today; I am really pleased to be here. There is a long-standing perception that institutes are not meeting the needs and are in need of reform, and that cuts across the wider justice system, particularly in light of the quite significant reductions in social welfare and legal aid. There has been a big pressure on advice services and people understanding and being able to access their rights to justice. We see that has a real impact in the advice sector.

We are often asked whether people understand that they have a legal advice need, and I would say they do not in the majority of cases. Within our local offices, people arrive with literally bags or suitcases of letters that they are too stressed or have too many complex issues to look at, and even if they do, they are not necessarily aware that that equates to a legal advice need.

The Chair: What sort of problems do these encompass? Are they family problems? Property problems?

Sarah Matthews: It can be across the spectrum: housing problems, rent arrears, arrears with other bills that they have—for example, energy—family problems, all sorts of debt that requires quality debt advice to support them. They do not necessarily recognise that that is a legal advice need or that if it is not dealt with at the earliest opportunity, it will then end up in the court and they will be in far more crisis.

Our officers say they will come with one perceived need and leave with nine by the time we have gone through all the letters with them, but nine needs that are addressed. The point I am trying to make is it is important that there is a strong, well-funded advice sector that is able to support people at the earliest opportunity to identify those needs, and that alleviates the stress on them and on the court system.

Kate Pasfield: Just by way of a bit of background, I also work one day a week as a housing legal aid solicitor in a legal aid practice in London, and before working for LAPG I was a housing legal aid solicitor for 15 years, so I have switched roles. I am also on the Civil Justice Council as the legal aid member.

I wanted to talk about the legal aid situation. It is well recognised that there are currently gaps in provision of legal aid across most areas of law in most areas of the country. A lot of research is going on at the moment with the Law Society and its heat maps showing areas where there are legal aid deserts. What it means by that is that there are no legal aid providers in many areas of the country; it is particularly rural areas and coastal areas that are affected.

It has looked at all the areas where there are or are not legal aid contracts in different areas of law, so it is worth having a look at its heat maps. They have legal aid deserts and legal aid droughts. Legal aid deserts are areas where there are no legal aid providers at all. The droughts are where there might be a legal aid provider—maybe one or two—but there is no measure of what their capacity is to take on cases.

LexisNexis has also done some research looking at legal incidents: things that happen such as crimes that are committed or people who might need advice for various reasons, mapped against where the legal aid providers are. So there is lots of research on it.

Our members are legal aid providers and part of my job is speaking to them, trying to help them through the legal aid system and understanding their issues. A lot of them are reporting very high numbers of clients who they cannot take on. One big firm I spoke to recently sent me all the statistics that it had started to gather; it was collecting evidence on every client that rang up and how many cases it could take on. Every month, it was turning away about 300 people. A lot of those were asylum appeals; presumably those people might have tried other firms but probably had the same response. I guess the question is what happens to those people if they cannot get legal advice.

The Chair: That was exactly my supplementary question. What happens to these groups of people who are unable to access some form of legal aid?

Kate Pasfield: I do not know what happens to them. They presumably try to help themselves, or family or someone tries to help them. I know that there are people who are spending three to six months trying to find themselves a legal aid lawyer. The Legal Aid Agency has recently started trying to assess the capacity in the system. It started with a small group to pilot the process and sent them a survey to try to understand capacity—asking questions about how many cases people are able to take on—just so that it has a better understanding. I do not know what happens to these people. I presume they try their best to find help in other ways, but these matters affect their lives very deeply; an asylum appeal where you cannot get any help is a really serious problem.

Have I got time to say one other thing? Bear in mind that legal aid generally covers the types of cases where someone is challenging the decision of some sort of body of the state. That is what the majority of legal aid is for—I am happy to read out a list of all the areas it covers if that would be helpful, so just let me know about that. But if someone cannot challenge a state decision, where does that lead us? Does it lead us into decision-making becoming worse? People cannot find help with these very fundamental issues that are affecting their lives, to do with their children, homelessness, their mental health, and the welfare benefits.

Lord Griffiths of Burry Port: Could you read that list out for us, please?

Kate Pasfield: On welfare benefits, the only thing that is in scope is work in the Upper Tribunal; work in the lower tribunal was taken out of scope by the Legal Aid, Sentencing, and Punishment of Offenders Act 2012. We have immigration and asylum. We have housing work, but possession cases where often a public body—a housing association or a local council—is the claimant. We have homelessness decisions, community care, court of protection, public family law, private family law, criminal law, prison law, claims against public authorities, actions against the police, mental health, discrimination, education, and inquest. You can see that most of that is going to be a challenge on a state decision.

The Chair: Assuming they get legal aid and are challenging a decision of one of these state bodies, do you have any statistics as to what the success rates are?

Kate Pasfield: I do not have those statistics with me, but I am sure I could find out. Anecdotally, I know that it is recognised. Nimrod, you might be able to help with that.

Nimrod Ben-Cnaan: There is a merits test to a case. You do not take a case on legal aid willy-nilly; it has to have a more probable chance of success for you to even take it up as a provider, if that helps understand how we even get into it.

The Chair: Sorry, Kate, we interrupted you.

Kate Pasfield: That is fine. That is just a question, is it not: what happens when people cannot challenge state decision-making? There is also an issue with judicial review challenges, because legal aid is available—or the provider gets paid—only if it is successful in getting permission. If it does not get permission, it does not get paid. A lot of providers just do not want to take the risk of taking on those cases; it is hard to find providers that will take on judicial review work.

Lord Anderson of Ipswich: If you do have any figures on success rate—however defined—it would be interesting to see them.

Kate Pasfield: Yes.

Lord Anderson of Ipswich: You also mentioned research mapping need on to areas of desert and drought. If you could link us to that research, it would be useful to see it.

Nimrod Ben-Cnaan: I have little to add after Sarah and Kate have spoken, except to highlight a few points that perhaps can easily get missed out. In having such a selective scope definition for legal aid, there is a lot that gets missed out and we forget—at one remove from it—that people’s problems cluster. When you have one, you are very likely to have more. The problem is that if your legal aid provider is commissioned to help you with only one part of the problem, are you effectively resolving the problem? How much of a benefit—a return on public investment—does this really allow? Surely we should be commissioning legal aid on the basis of resolving the problem rather than on an arbitrary menu, if you like, of problems that we would help and others that we would not.

To answer the point about what happens to people who do not get legal aid or legal assistance of any kind with their problem, and to answer very quickly about research: every few years, the Legal Services Board for England and Wales—the statutory legal regulator—commissions a Legal Needs Survey of a national scope. It looks precisely at questions like that: the incidence rate of legal problems. Over the four years before the last survey was run in 2023, two-thirds of the population had had some sort of civil legal problem, so that gives you an indication of just how common legal problems really are.

To come back to Lord Strathclyde’s point, the important thing is that when all is said and done, at the end of the process—where the problem occurs and what you do about it—32% of people have had unmet legal need. That is, they needed assistance and for whatever reason did not access it, because it was not available, affordable, accessible; there is a whole array of circumstances that curtail people’s access to legal assistance, definitely in a timely manner, and we need to be mindful of that. There is quite a lot of good research and definitely a lot of good practitioner experience to suggest how we may close that gap, which is what we are all in the business of doing. It is just that partly it costs money and that is part of the situation.

To zoom out finally and just say something about the state of the rule of law in general, to answer the original question, it is worse than it seems in this country, certainly from our perspective. The call for evidence by the committee mentioned the World Justice Project’s Rule of Law Index. In the Rule of Law Index, the area in which the UK performs by far the worst is the accessibility and affordability of civil justice. The runners-up to that are enforcement of workers’ rights and avoidance of discrimination. This is our patch; we are talking from the bottom of that pit to tell you it is worse than it seems, and this is what it looks like in practice.

The Chair: Thank you very much indeed. Those were three good statements.

Q69 Lord Foulkes of Cumnock: Welcome to the committee. As you were going through the various issues, it just occurred to me that five of us here used to be members of the other place in the Commons. And I remember during my time there I used to be approached constantly by individuals on the issues that you raise, on their particular point but also on the wider issue. If we got half a dozen or more on a particular issue, then it was a matter to be taken up. How much contact are you first advising them to make with their MPs individually, and how much representation are you making on general issues that seem to be coming up to MPs and Parliament?

Sarah Matthews: I am happy to start with that and I can reflect on the point on return of investment as well. At that individual level, in relevant circumstances, we would suggest and recommend that somebody did contact their Member of Parliament. In terms of engaging Citizens Advice directly, we are working as the legal support part of MoJ at the moment, which is looking at legal support system reform, and Dame Moriarty—our chief exec—is on the working group for that.

I understood I could bring recommendations today. One recommendation that we are making through that work and that I would like to make today is that there is a need for a national Westminster government-owned advice strategy that sets out what advice is and is not and looks to ensure that government departments—central and local government—are all aware of what advice is and have standard commissioning funding of good-quality advice. That is not happening at the moment, and I am happy to follow up with examples.

I would estimate that millions of pounds-worth of public money is wasted on funding services that are supposed to be advice but are actually information and signposting services. They are non-advice sector organisations, and often they will provide low-level advice and then signpost to our services. That comes with inherent risks. As I said before, people are not aware that they have a legal advice need. If their first point of contact is with what they are told is an advice service but is not an advice service, that worker may not and is likely not to pick up that they have an advice need.

In terms of signposting, if we are talking about signposting the most vulnerable in society, my previous role was as a family and children’s social worker. Families who are that vulnerable have so many complex needs and referrals that the likelihood of them slipping through the net and not reaching the advice sector organisation is very high. What also happens is the advice sector is not getting that funding but those that do reach us through signposting are reaching overwhelmed services. In some instances what we are finding is they are naming our network and saying, “Just signpost; you don’t have to have them as a paid partner”.

Wales has the Single Advice Fund and that is guided by a national Welsh advice strategy. Sitting underneath that there are regional strategies. So they really home in on that local regional need and it ensures that public sector funding is pooled and there is a consistent offer of advice. There are a lot of reports, such as the Law Commission’s 2013 report and the Bach report. I can send you quite a few links that support the need for such an advice strategy. The Advice Services Alliance and its members support this recommendation as well.

Lord Foulkes of Cumnock: That is really helpful. Is it working effectively in Wales?

Sarah Matthews: Yes. I can promote it because I am Welsh and was also supporting our network in Wales during the consultation.

Baroness Laing of Elderslie: That was very interesting, and I agree with Lord Foulkes. Having been a constituency MP, I used to work very closely with Citizens Advice. We were doing the same thing and had some excellent volunteers where I worked. You asked something earlier: when is advice advice and when is it guidance? This is a really important point because if you give legal advice and it is wrong and you do not carry professional indemnity insurance, then you are in trouble. But if it is not advice, then you are not liable. I do not know if everybody understands the distinction I am making. I used to feel it personally because I used to be a solicitor long ago, and constituents would see that I was once a solicitor. They would come and say, “Well, you can tell me this”, and I would write down, “I do not carry professional indemnity insurance”. Does it matter? Is there a way around this?

Sarah Matthews: This is why the National Advice Strategy is so integral to this. Again, I can follow up with examples that we have. Just to give you one example now, we have recently challenged a public sector department for writing in its market engagement events that the successful provider for debt advice does not need financial conduct regulation and registration but needs to provide DROs and IVAs. That is a serious need for education.

Lord Burnett of Maldon: Could you help with the acronyms?

Sarah Matthews: Sorry—a debt relief order, which is a legal order, and an individual voluntary agreement. Both can be provided only by FCA—Financial Conduct Authority—registered organisations. There are many examples that we can give you, and in that example itself, the contracts were for £134 million a year.

Q70 Baroness Hamwee: My question is in this area, but in a sense is the converse and is more about public understanding. I wondered whether you would like to say anything about people who come with bags full of documents but their problem is not a legal one. They have tried everything. “Somebody’s got to be able to sort this out for me”. This is a situation I have come across very often. Are you very burdened by that?

Sarah Matthews: Yes. Our brand is recognised and trusted, and I would say there is a perception that we are integral to society in terms of providing that advice. We do not turn anybody away regardless of the need. The difficulty is that our services are overwhelmed, as with many advice sector organisations, and that is due in part to the signposting of people without funding. But our services are free to people who turn up at our door.

Baroness Hamwee: I was wondering more about the other two witnesses.

Kate Pasfield: I have had many years of dealing with people. I was a housing solicitor for many years, and that was a particularly common thing with clients. They would have some awareness that they had a problem: they were getting into rent arrears, benefits had stopped, something had happened and life was falling apart. Then they would become too scared to answer the phone or open all their post; they would not be sleeping and would be so stressed by the situation that they found it difficult to just open letters and read them. That was very common.

Face-to-face legal advice is so important for certain types of people in certain areas of law, because people need to be hand-held through a process that they find really stressful and do not understand at all. For a housing lawyer, when someone has been threatened or issued with possession proceedings and is facing losing their home, that is a very stressful and possibly difficult thing to deal with. People would turn up with letters and I used to spend hours opening their post, putting it into piles. “That is the debt pile, that is the court proceedings pile, this is something from your doctor”. And as a housing solicitor I would not be paid for that time because that is not housing work, but if someone turns up with that situation you cannot not help them, because you need to know what is happening with their housing situation. I worked in a law centre in London for about 10 years.

Baroness Hamwee: I am just trying to explore people’s understanding of the limits of legal rights.

The Chair: Maybe we will come to that in a moment. Baroness Andrew has a question on this.

Baroness Andrews: Thank you so much for your evidence so far. I have a couple of questions directed to Sarah following what she said, and then a couple of questions on legal aid, if I may. They are very short questions.

Sarah, so many good ideas come out of Wales, so it is nice to hear of another one. The gap seems to be between the ability to provide advice, which people understand, and then the ability to access the means of justice to take it to court and get their redress. Has Wales succeeded in filling that gap as well? Has it streamlined its legal aid system to the point where people are more likely to be able to reach a solicitor because there is slightly more provision available? Does it follow through?

Sarah Matthews: I would have to go back to the Welsh Government and our network to check on that. What I would say is that it has certainly streamlined access to advice services for citizens in Wales. There is a very clear route, because all the public sector funding is provided through one partnership in each of the regions, so there is a central access point that everybody can go to, and that just does not exist within England at the moment. There are a couple of regions—including GLA, Greater London Authority—that are developing their advice strategy at the minute, so progress may be made there. I know that the advice sector in Merseyside has brought a draft advice strategy together, but that has not been adopted yet. The access is certainly streamlined, but I would have to come back to you on the legal aid point.

Baroness Andrews: That would be really important. On the second question, you said you were involved with the Legal Support Strategy Delivery Group. Have you provided evidence to it that you could share with us?

Sarah Matthews: Yes.

Baroness Andrews: That would be very useful. Do you know when it is supposed to report?

Sarah Matthews: I do not. Again, I would have to follow up on that.

Nimrod Ben-Cnaan: It is in the autumn, but it may be slightly flexible there.

Baroness Andrews: The Government sent written evidence to us where they said that the Ministry of Justice has established this group “with whom we will co-develop”—so that was you and hopefully many others—“efficient and effective legal support … that enables people to resolve their … problems at an early stage”. This is actually quite important. Have you have been involved in that?

Sarah Matthews: Yes.

Nimrod Ben-Cnaan: Yes, we all are.

Q71 Baroness Andrews: That is encouraging too. My question on legal aid is that the Government announced that the criminal legal aid solicitors will receive more money—£92 million a year—to deal with that. There seems to have been no equivalent investment in the civil legal system. I do not know whether I am wrong about that or whether you want to comment. They also say, “We have recently undertaken a comprehensive review of civil legal aid and just concluded a consultation on uplifts to housing and debt, and immigration and asylum legal aid fees”. Have they asked the right questions? Is that the right approach? Have you been involved? Will it make a difference?

Nimrod Ben-Cnaan: That is a lot of questions.

Baroness Andrews: I am sorry.

Kate Pasfield: They have just announced a consultation on criminal legal aid fees and prison law fees, which has just opened. The way it tends to work is that the MoJ—having spent a long time looking at the situation—will make a set of recommendations, put it out to public consultation, and our organisations all respond. LAPG has an advisory committee that I manage, and that is 30 legal aid practitioners across different areas of law. I will go to our criminal legal aid solicitors and the prison law people and ask them what they think about these particular uplifts. That is ongoing.

The consultation on the fees increase for housing, debt, and immigration and asylum closed about a month and a half ago. We put in a very long consultation response, and we spoke to quite a lot of our members who are doing this work to ask them what difference it might make. Everyone is very happy that there is a fees uplift coming—that is the first one in many years—but the state of the legal aid sector is so dire that people cannot attract staff and people leave; it is a really challenging environment, so it takes a long time. Even with a fees uplift—it is not a particularly big fees uplift but is very welcome—it takes a long time for things to make a difference, because trying to train up staff is a long process, and at the moment people cannot recruit.

Baroness Andrews: So you have both a supply and demand problem.

Kate Pasfield: Yes. There is just not the capacity to deal with the demand and it is a very big problem, is it not?

Nimrod Ben-Cnaan: It is a huge problem.

The Chair: Do you have anything to add to that?

Nimrod Ben-Cnaan: Just very briefly. In the review of civil legal aid that you have mentioned—which obviously Lord Bellamy commissioned when he was still Minister—one key report that it produced looked at the state of the market in general and argued quite clearly that it is not just that you need significant investment in civil legal aid but that you need it fast enough to prevent it declining further. There is an urgency element to it as well. Even so, things like recruiting new staff or getting them to the level where they can earn enough to sustain the business will take a little longer in the medium term. But we need to make a start.

Q72 Lord Griffiths of Burry Port: I am most grateful for your presence, which is adding a dimension to our study that we desperately needed to hear, and for all the work that you do with people with genuine needs who sometimes just come in off the street. Those are the interests that we also want to safeguard.

As a conceptual thing, I am interested in public education. The notes that we have suggest that different things are happening in schools here, there and everywhere, and so it should perhaps fall under the rubric of citizenship or something like that. They go on to say that the submissions we have received are heavily weighted in favour of people who say they are not aware of their legal entitlements, the way the law lies and affects them and so on, and I would have to include myself. I would give those answers myself if I were asked. We are woefully ignorant.

The conceptual problem for me is this. It is like with computers; I have a lad in the office, things go wrong, he twiddles his fingers and tells me, “I’ve done it. Did you see how I did it?” And of course I have not. It is the whole business of how our awareness proceeds in respect of issues that come to our attention. By then, of course, the ignorance is part of the problem that is brought forward with the bags of letters and all the rest of it.

I am interested in public education. How do we organise a raising of awareness and an increase of public understanding of the law? Yesterday, some of us sat in the Royal Courts of Justice—in a very oppressive room that scared the life out of me—listening to high-flying people saying high-flying things. I sat next to somebody, told him that we were doing the rule of law and asked him to help me. He said that he was on a special committee that does precisely that and started talking to me about it—we have been doing this for a month or six weeks now—introducing elements that I had no clue about as being part of the discussion.

I am sorry to take so long, but for me, the public education thing is desperately important. I am a theologian, and I have been trying to explain the most complex things about theology to people who did or did not want to know about them. I went out into the public square and opened up a stall in September with people doing photography for beginners, French for their holidays and stuff like that, and Theology on Thursday. It was by far the biggest course because people who had things happening to them—not things out of the Bible, church history and stuff, but things happening to them about the meaning of life—just flocked to it.

How do we find a way of taking the issues that we are concerned about and the state of the law that we all live under into the public arena to begin a conversation and raise awareness? For me, that is the biggest question of them all, because all the other things that we have been doing happen as a result of a crisis or a question being raised to which we have to find an answer. I want to know why the question was raised in the first place.

Nimrod Ben-Cnaan: I could not agree with you more. Our proposal is really to have not just an advice strategy but an access to justice strategy that starts at that point precisely, before even reaching out for advice, in proactively telling people what their rights are, either on a need-to-know basis—when it is appropriate, when it arises—or in a preventative way. A lot of that goes missing.

Earlier, I mentioned the Legal Needs Survey from the Legal Services Board. One finding is that basically only one in six of us who has a legal problem understands it to be a legal problem in the first instance. That means that if we even get to the point of deciding to take action about it, we will look in all the wrong places first, which means that our path to assistance and justice—ultimately, hopefully—will be longer and more tortuous than it needs to be.

So, yes, we need to put these helping measures in people’s way, and there is so much to hobble them. There is digital exclusion to a great degree. The language of the law—the legalese—is itself an alienating element. We have talked about there being lots of mental bandwidth issues. Normally, when you realise you have a problem you are already in a crisis, it has already escalated and you do not feel as able to act on it in a meaningful way. It needs to be part of the solution, and we need much more of it in various turns of our lives.

The Chair: I assume that neither of you disagree with that view, but is there anything you would like to add?

Kate Pasfield: The only thing I would like to add is that people spend years training to be lawyers and the law is so complicated, especially with matters that affect these very fundamental parts of your life. It is hard to educate people on things that are very complicated, and they come across the complicated situation only at the point that they need a lawyer. Alongside education, there has to also be a robust legal aid and advice system to be able to help people. People can have a basic understanding of some parts of the law that apply to their lives, but some parts are so complicated.

The Chair: We are about to go through two big changes on employee rights and rental reform. Do you think the Government are clear enough and have a system of rolling out information to provide clarity on the meaning of the new parts of the law that will stop people coming to you with a problem because they understand the impact that these things have on their lives?

Sarah Matthews: In short answer to that, I would say no. It was one of the points that I was going to make in terms of the demand on advice services: that it is really important for the Government to think about policy changes and the impact that that has on the advice sector. The changes that you talk about there have brought a great deal of demand to our door.

Just to build on what has already been said, with those policy changes, education is really important, but you cannot keep people educated all the time; it is really complex. We have our expert advice team putting out continual information and training on all the changes in policy, people’s rights, implications and needs for advice.

Something that we are trying to do is reach out to young people, because the education needs to start in school. We have started doing a lot more stuff on Twitter and so on to put information out there about people’s rights.

Baroness Hamwee: Under accessibility of the law, I had written, “Is it accessible to the professionals?” I ask that question as a long-retired solicitor, very aware of the difficulties of keeping up. I just wondered if there was anything very short you might say about that.

Kate Pasfield: I try to keep up with the housing law. I have just gone back into practice one day a week, so I am having to catch up really quickly. The organisation I work for has the resources—training, books and online resources—for me to do that. But I am a trained lawyer, so I can understand what I am reading.

Just in relation to the Renters’ Rights Bill, the digital side of access to justice is through the court reform programme. It is currently developing an online digital possession service, which I understand is going to be ready in about 18 months. That should take some pressure off, because once the new Act comes in, every case will have to have a court hearing, whereas before, a lot of no-fault evictions were dealt with on paper, so it was not necessary to have a court hearing. There are problems coming down the line.

Q73 Lord Murphy of Torfaen: Can I just ask you a little more about young people and the idea that they should be taught about the rule of law in some way or another? In England—remember that 11 million of us do not live in England but in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland, which may have a slightly different policy on this—there is a policy that schools should promote British values, which includes the rule of law.

A very long time ago, I used to teach British constitution but only those people who came to me would know about that issue; everybody else in the small college did not. Do you have any views as to whether there has been any success in younger people being taught about the rule of law and what it means when they come to adulthood and then have to come to you if they need advice?

Nimrod Ben-Cnaan: A lot of the interventions that we are talking about—partly because of resourcing or funding—tend to be targeted rather than catch-all, but they are very successful where they are.

For example, our Suffolk Law Centre in Ipswich—which Lord Anderson would know well—has a project helping young people who have autism and are leaving education and moving into the world of work. In essence, it issues them with a passport, if you like, telling them about their own rights and telling their prospective employers or interviewers about what kind of reasonable adjustments they are entitled to and what kind of considerations should be borne in mind to make work accessible for them. It is immensely successful, partly because it is collaborative work. It is not just the law centre, but the law centre working hand-in-hand with a local disability group and a local university, and it had good interest from employers because they see the benefit of it. People want to do well. So we see these interventions and they are successful, but we need more of them.

Sarah Matthews: I can give you an example just quickly from Wales—and follow up with details—where again, as part of the Single Advice Fund, they highlighted a need with young people in one region. Our services are going in, in a young person-accessible way, and delivering advice and information on rights in Barnardo’s services. They are going directly to where the young people are and delivering that in a young-person-friendly way. I am also aware of another project that did financial capability and rights around that through the medium of music and art. I can follow up with some examples.

Q74 Lord Anderson of Ipswich: Thank you very much and thank you for coming. We are interested, as you can tell, in anything you can tell us about how access to justice could be improved, whether through empowering agents and advisers such as yourselves or, conversely, by empowering individuals to do it on their own. Part of that, of course, relates to artificial intelligence, and I shall leave that subject to Lord Burnett, who I know is particularly interested in it. But without restricting the breadth of your answers, I would like to ask each of you a specific question within that area.

Nimrod, you have kindly mentioned the Suffolk Law Centre, of which I am a great admirer and indeed supporter, but I think the committee would benefit from a more generalised view of the Law Centres Network. How comprehensive and consistent is it? How far is it a substitute in the legal aid drought areas and deserts, from which Law Centres suffers in much the same way? How does that relate to the citizens advice bureaux? That would be a useful general picture for us to have.

Kate, you indicated that the legal aid fee uplift, although welcome, would not be sufficient to solve all the problems. Are there other barriers, not purely financial, in the way of firms providing legal aid? For example, could or should it be easier to take on legal aid contracts? We grew up in the days when every firm did a little legal aid. I am conscious that is very different.

Sarah, I know from my wife’s experience as a CAB volunteer that you have, or had, a wonderful database that allows your advisers to access and explain the law on any given subject. Unfortunately, my wife would never let me look at it, for no doubt good reasons of confidentiality. If that resource still exists, is there any prospect of it being made available more widely, perhaps even to the general public, if you were funded to do that, or is that out of the question?

Nimrod Ben-Cnaan: Law Centres is a form of law practice that is not-for-profit. It is a registered charity. Law Centres employs solicitors and caseworkers and gives specialist legal advice. Our mainstay is social welfare law. There are currently 40-odd members across the country; we share some with the Citizens Advice network, and in fact nearly all are legal aid providers as well. As legal aid does not quite pay its way, no practice can subsist on legal aid work alone, and law centres are no exception to that. The first law centres opened in 1970. We are in our seventh decade of operation and are well established in communities.

Through cuts, we saw the law centres that were most exposed to legal aid drop in income. In that process, we lost a lot of law centres, which we have been struggling to regain. Thankfully, quite a few new groups have wanted to set up new law centres since the introduction of the LASPO Act, but as there have been no significant policy changes on civil legal aid for several years, we have seen the provider base overall shrink around us. Law Centres has, relatively, kept faith with legal aid, but we now find, despite being only 3% of civil legal aid providers in the areas that we work, we have an outsized presence, if you like.

Law Centres is one in two providers of welfare benefits legal aid. We are one in three providers for discrimination law. We are one in five of the housing court duty desk operators. We operate one in seven immigration contracts. We are one in eight of the providers on housing. Rather than showing just how big we have become—as I said we have only 40-odd members—it demonstrates how small the legal aid community has become in general. As vital signs go, this one should be worrying. I am just putting us in context.

Kate Pasfield: It is quite a big question. In terms of the barriers, other than fees, which sit behind a lot of the barriers, the Legal Aid Agency recently changed the way it contracts for providers to an always-on process, as it calls it. It used to be that every three to five years it put out a procurement exercise, and people could bid. That is how it did it. If you did not bid in that round, or for some reason your bid was not successful, you would have to wait. But now there is an always-on process for civil and crime, so you can bid at any point. That is a big change in how it does things. If you do not meet the criteria the first time around, you can sort things out, go back and put in a new bid. That barrier has gone, but there are many others.

Staff is a big one because in each area of law, if you take on a category of work, you must have a supervisor who needs a certain number of years of experience covering certain types of cases. They have to fill out a supervisor form. Legal aid supervisors are very hard to recruit. People try to recruit and get no applicants whatever for lots of these jobs because the pay is low. People often start out in a legal aid practice, stay for a few years, get a training contract, finish it, and then the pay does not go up because legal aid fees are the same regardless of how experienced you are. Whereas in other types of law, solicitors are paid more if they are more experienced, legal aid fees are the same regardless of how many years of experience you have. There are exceptions where you can claim enhancements on certain types of work, but it means a lot of people move on from legal aid practices once they are qualified. There is a big gap in staff. That is one of the barriers.

There is a lot of bureaucracy in the legal aid scheme. There are contracts, rules, guidance, and it is a very complicated scheme; understanding how to run a legal aid contract is almost an area of law by itself. Some firms have practice managers who specialise in legal aid contracting so that they understand, because you cannot make mistakes. If you make mistakes, you can be sanctioned by the LAA, so it is important to understand your contract and how it works and applies to your areas of law.

There is lots of work within the system that is not paid. At the moment, we are running a project which tries to measure all the non-chargeable time involved in legal aid work. When we think about how low the fees are, we see that a lot of people are spending about a third of their time on work they cannot charge for but have to do as part of their contract. That is also a barrier, because people cannot charge for all the time they spend.

Lord Anderson of Ipswich: So money is largely at the root of all the problems?

Kate Pasfield: Yes, I am afraid it is.

Sarah Matthews: I do not have the seniority to outright say yes.

Lord Anderson of Ipswich: I did not think you would.

Sarah Matthews: However, as part of our work on legal support reform, we are committed to contributing to digital access to that reform system. At the minute, we spend a lot of time investing in self-help and online digital tools, while recognising still that a multi-channelled approach is required. Some people want digital; others want face-to-face. Some people telephone; some people email. But digital self-help is a big part of what we do. We collect data from our network of 240-odd local citizens advice centres across England and Wales, and that also enables us to give clients a seamless journey. We are very rich in data and happy to share, as we do, with lots of government departments.

Lord Anderson of Ipswich: Just one more question, if I may, to you, Sarah, and to Nimrod. There is obviously not much money in the public purse, but there would appear to be quite a bit of money at one end of the legal profession—I declare an interest as a member of a commercial chambers in London. I started work with a large firm in the US, which at any one time had two associates working in neighbourhood law centres for six-month spells. The only problem with that was they liked the work so much, they always left the law firm. Is there more that the big law firms and chambers could be doing? My sense is there is pro bono work, but it is a bit random. Is there anything that you would like to see or could imagine by way of better support from your fellow legal advisers elsewhere in the profession?

Sarah Matthews: We are exploring that approach of pro bono through the legal support reform work but also through corporate funding. We are sharing examples with the MoJ legal support team around some of those things. Pro bono is a big part of that. Kate has alluded to training and the ability to recruit solicitors as well. We can look at that in terms of people volunteering and having access to Citizens Advice to go on that journey.

Nimrod Ben-Cnaan: Law Centres already operates in the pro bono sphere, partly because it is very useful for getting this type of work into the community. If you come from a city law firm and set up stall in the town square, why would people come to you necessarily? It is important to have a familiar point of access in the community, and that is where Law Centres plays a role and does a lot of that.

We are looking with interest at new research that has just been commissioned by the Nuffield Foundation and the Access to Justice Foundation which looks at additional models for funding and otherwise resourcing advice. It is a three-year project but will have interim reporting points. It will include things that may be of use, such as an IOLTA scheme, this being interest on lawyers’ trust accounts—a very common system in other common-law jurisdictions, as you would know—that could create more resourcing to provide for things such as a legal support strategy or other more responsive provisions. In designing services, we are always caught out by black swan events. It is important to keep responsive, and I hope some funding created would also be for things like that and not just for ongoing, standing services.

Q75 Lord Burnett of Maldon: Can I follow up on Lord Anderson’s questions and say how fascinating I find this discussion? The examples you give of what your various organisations are concerned with illustrate the enormous range of support that different people require. You have identified a large group who do not know they have a problem. Their difficulties will be triggered by somebody else doing something—maybe a prosecution for not having a TV licence or a possession action or debt recovery. I suspect there is quite a large group of people—Nimrod and Kate, you referred to them—who have simply lost control of their lives. Rather than needing immediate legal advice, it sounds as though they need somebody to sit down with them, open the envelopes and say, “Well, you’ve got problems with your utilities. You’re not paying your council tax. You’re in arrears of rent. You’re not responding to your doctor” and so forth, and maybe legal problems will come out of that. Then you have those who know they have a problem with the law, housing, employment, benefits or immigration. It is a matter of what one does when we know there is a problem.

Lawyers charging by the hour, whatever the rates, soon become quite expensive. There is a lot of work going on in trying to find ways of short-circuiting that by using technology. Kate, you referred to projects in the courts and tribunals which are part of that. It is striking that just in the last week or so we read that the Solicitors Regulation Authority has authorised a new model which will explicitly use AI.

A lot of time is spent by lawyers in the first instance gathering information and facts from the client, which often turn out to be controversial, and then applying the law. For many years, it seemed to me that sooner or later technology would be able to deal with quite a lot of preliminary advice: put your facts in and then the technology will have access to all the law and give you a preliminary view, just as would a solicitor. Do you think this is the way things are going, and is it coming quite quickly? The CAB is working on this, and a lot of law firms are introducing this internally to help their lawyers. Do you think that that will improve access to justice and, as importantly, cut the cost of seeking legal advice and taking legal action?

Sarah Matthews: We are doing a lot of work in this area. I can follow up, but we have been working with the Cabinet Office on AI products. You mentioned the amount of time lawyers have to spend noting down information: one of our local networks is using a system that listens in to the call or face-to-face meeting with the client, records it and slots into our data system all the needs and bits that have been addressed. Then all the adviser has to do is look through and check that it is a true record. That saves a lot of time. There are also many projects going on, not just with us but more widely, that look at information being put in and then the AI giving that initial advice. There is lots I can follow up on there. It is a fast-paced area at the moment, but I would say it is really important that it is always tested and challenged to make sure that it gives correct advice.

Lord Burnett of Maldon: If these tools become available generally online, as undoubtedly they will, will it make your lives easier or more difficult?

Kate Pasfield: It is a really hard question to answer when you are dealing with very vulnerable people. I suppose it might help the lawyers. I am aware of some AI products that are being developed to help legal aid providers triage clients because they deal with lots of new inquiries that could possibly be done more easily and quickly by AI rather than a person. But you still need to help the person who is in this chaotic situation. There are lots of advances going on in the court system with online processes which I am sure can speed up things; for example, e-filing, and other things that can be done much more quickly.

But on the other side of things is the enormous number of people who lack digital skills. The CJC is currently doing a big piece of work—there is an interim report about to come out, but there will also be a consultation—looking at digital disadvantage within the justice system. It did a scan of recent research which shows a very high level of digital disadvantage within the population and a high level of need for people to be assisted through these processes. Even if you have an online digital possession service, people need help to use it. Who is going to give that help?

Lord Burnett of Maldon: The problem comes in earlier, does it not, because we all have to deal online with almost every provider of anything, including public services?

Kate Pasfield: Yes. A lot of clients who are likely to want legal aid might not even have access to a computer or a smartphone, or they might be homeless. Prisoners certainly do not have access to the internet and neither do people in mental health institutions. Lots of people do not have access. So it is a big discussion, is it not?

Nimrod Ben-Cnaan: Certainly, digital exclusion is a fundamental that we will need to keep addressing. The court reform programme that is just concluding proceeded on the assumption that the rate of digital exclusion in the general population is 18%. Obviously, there is a higher incidence of it in people living in disadvantage. What are we doing for them? I would also throw in a more mundane analogy about those services, and that is the supermarket self-checkout. One of the worst things you can hear is, “Unidentified item in bagging area”. It stops you dead in your tracks and you need a person to sort you out.

Even with the approval by the SRA recently of that AI law firm, as it was dubbed in the headlines—there was an interview with one of the founders in the Law Society Gazette last week—when we look at it more closely, we see that basically all the AI processes still go through a flesh-and-blood solicitor for approval and quality assurance. So we are still not there. It is potentially of hugely important assistance. AI is about to revolutionise online searching in general so that you get a plain English answer rather than a list of links, and it has already changed your orientation toward it. It has the potential, in the fullness of time, to shorten and maybe simplify people’s journeys from recognising they have a problem to getting appropriate assistance; some of that may be self-help. There are some very interesting experiments right now that we too are involved in and are looking out for. As providers we already use AI to make office processes more efficient, but in the act of advice giving, we have some way to go.

We mentioned earlier how problems cluster. We all know from advice-giving situations that people also have related issues that need to be addressed, sometimes even more urgently than a presenting problem. If all you input is a particular problem that you think you have, and if you do not present and input all the information because it would not occur to you to do so, you get a poorer response for it. We have a way to go, but it is definitely very promising.

Lord Griffiths of Burry Port: You touched on things I wanted to ask about. Before sitting on this committee, I sat on the Communications and Digital Committee, which did a report on digital exclusion. We went around three or four different hubs—in areas where banks have shut and all the rest of it—where people with no access to computer skills were able to help each other to do certain basic things. That was a most interesting exercise, I have to say. You mentioned percentages. We always assume that young people are better equipped than us older people. The astonishing fact is, according to the surveys we looked at, young people are very good at what interests them but in terms of a breadth and familiarity with computer technology, they are as defunct as me.

On another side of this, Shami Chakrabarti, a Member of the House of Lords who spoke on the Floor of the House just a few days ago, talked about large language models that are only as good as what they are fed with. They tend to produce algorithms that cannot work out variations and nuances that relate, for example, to deprivation, racial groups, and things like that. So there is always a very serious need to be in a position to correct or oversee the very tools that we know we must commit our future to.

Q76 Lord Bellamy: Perhaps I may ask a follow-up to Lord Burnett’s question. How far does the arrival of online technology help us with the problem of legal aid deserts? In principle, there is no reason why a solicitor in Manchester should not advise somebody in Norfolk or Northumberland.

Kate Pasfield: It is quite client-dependent.

Lord Bellamy: It is not first best, but it is perhaps better than nothing.

Kate Pasfield: Yes. It is already happening in areas of the country where there is no legal aid provision. The Legal Aid Agency runs a list of providers that will offer remote advice to people because there is no provision in the south-west of England, but even though the list exists, solicitors say they do not have capacity to give remote advice. PLP—the Public Law Project—is doing a project where it rings up all the people on the list. Most of them do not have capacity, so remote advice is helpful.

Lord Bellamy: We come back to the capacity problem.

Kate Pasfield: Yes. Providers lack capacity. They are also going to lack capacity to give remote advice because it is the same people who give the advice. Some clients could cope with that, and a lot do; others could not. It is a very mixed picture, which needs to be looked at carefully so that the right clients can have face-to-face services. Think about the person with the bag of letters that they have not opened or prisoners without access to the internet. There are some groups where that does not help and lots where it does. It is a very nuanced picture that needs to be thought about very carefully.

Q77 Lord Bellamy: Today, we have talked a lot about the first stage of getting legal advice, although for many it does not necessarily have to be legal; they just need advice. We bear in mind Nimrod’s point about cluster families who have just got into general difficulty. But supposing you have a legal problem and you need a means of resolving it, is it necessary that we have automatic access to a court, or are there other means and mechanisms for arriving at some sort of resolution, whether that is mediation, an ombudsman or something else? Do you have any views on that point?

Nimrod Ben-Cnaan: I would say sometimes it is necessary to have access to a court. Proceeding with another analogy, with NHS treatments, it is not an either/or; it is not “do this or that”. There are a range of available treatments, and you pick the one that you can access that works for you. There are various considerations. The rule of law index exercise looks at ADR mechanisms separately from the court, so the one does not set off the other. We still need good access to courts and affordability alongside ADR mechanisms.

The real issue in law centres, particularly through the by now long-standing withdrawal of support for legal assistance, is that civil justice is not just about resolving disputes. It can be reduced to that, and often is, but it is also about vindicating legal rights, especially when we add them. Renters are about to get more rights. Employed people are about to get more rights. When things go wrong, as they often do, you need advice and assistance to help you through, but you also need access to redress and not all these mechanisms necessarily offer you that. They would resolve the dispute, but would they solve the problem? Would they uphold the right? Would they uphold it in such a way that would help develop case law, for example? That is lost by not going through courts as much.

There are various reasons why ADR is promising but is not the solution and is probably not appropriate in quite a few situations or jurisdictions. In many cases, either you are faced with a public authority that will not settle because it has already made up its mind, or there is a disparity of arms, so you are faced with a tenant and a landlord or an employee and an employer. You need the leveller and recourse to that levelling or rebalancing function that the tribunal or the court allows you in order to encourage and spur parties on to approach ADR situations. You need to know that, if not this, then there is still court; there is still tribunal.

Kate Pasfield: ADR has been brought in for certain types of cases. With small money claims online, mandatory mediation has come in recently and is part-built into the system. As Nimrod said, ADR is suitable for certain types of cases. It is used in private family law cases where there has been no domestic abuse. But where you have one party being the state—I am just thinking of a mental health tribunal, for example—how on earth would that work with an ADR? You cannot really mediate. It works in some situations and not others. The other thing about courts is they test the evidence; it is important to be able to hear from a witness. So it is suitable in some situations.

Q78 Lord Bellamy: Leaving that on one side and moving on a little, would you support the introduction of a better scheme for early legal advice? How would it work? People of my generation at least hark fondly back to the old green form scheme of years ago where you got half an hour for £5 or something like that, as I remember it.

Kate Pasfield: Yes, I remember.

Lord Bellamy: The key point in this area is that one is up against the Treasury, which is faced with numerous demands from every quarter. It says, “Show us that this is value for money”. How would you establish that early legal advice is actually value for money? You feel intuitively it is, but how would you show the sceptics?

Kate Pasfield: Early legal advice can help with a lot of situations. Possession proceedings often are brought about because someone has rent arrears. Welfare benefits are out of scope. I was a welfare benefits caseworker for many years, and I mostly helped people resolve their welfare benefits problems. Your benefit stops when you get a decision; therefore, you have no money and your rent is not paid. But if you can resolve it early on by giving the person help, these other problems that come out of it do not happen, so it is saving money down the line in lots of scenarios. Early legal advice is not relevant in certain areas of law, but it is in many where these problems cluster. It still exists a bit in legal aid. There is the HLPAS scheme.

Lord Bellamy: Yes, there are various schemes in various areas.

Kate Pasfield: They are not very well used because it is the same people delivering the advice within the legal aid sector who are dealing with these schemes. So there is still a problem with lack of capacity.

Lord Bellamy: You would need more people, would you not?

Kate Pasfield: Yes, you would need more people.

Lord Bellamy: You have to up the general level of remuneration in order to bring more people into the sector, in order to have an effective early legal advice scheme.

Kate Pasfield: Yes.

Sarah Matthews: I could provide follow-up with reports of Citizens Advice work where return on investment is key to the provision of early, holistic advice. Just to cite a couple: in our Liverpool local offices there is a report on its advice on prescription scheme that shows the return on investment both in terms of people’s health and the amount of money spent, which then saved money down the line in terms of court and legal action. I can share that evaluation report. Also, our Winchester local services support people with mental health, and again there is an evaluation that shows the return on investment.

The other thing I would add to the Treasury argument is there is already money in the system that is not spent on advice. I go back to the national advice strategy. With devolution, it is going to become more of a problem because funding is going to be devolved and there will be new commissioners at devolved levels who do not understand advice. We have said, even with knowledge in this room, we do not always recognise what advice and legal advice are.

The Chair: I am going to quickly turn to Lady Andrews and then we must move on.

Baroness Andrews: Very quickly—I may have this completely wrong—the concept of access to justice expands to include social justice. Mediation in family law is now getting a much higher profile with people understanding they do not have to go immediately into the courts to resolve family differences. I wonder whether the concept of mediation as a whole, and maybe the notion of paralegal advice as a halfway house, could be pursued either in policy or as part of your campaign efforts, not to dilute access to justice but to expand the notion that there are steps before the nuclear option of going to court. Most people shy away from court if they know anything about it. A human reaction to wanting to know about the law is a sense of fear that you may get accidentally drawn into some Jarndyce-like situation which will cost you your house, your livelihood and everything else, and at the end of the day you will get nothing for it.

Sarah Matthews: The network gave me two examples which say that both are needed in terms of alternative dispute resolution. One was about mediation within the family law setting, where we still needed to support clients to access mediation because there was stress around those services, but we did so successfully, which prevented them from having to go to court. In that scenario, it worked. However, in another scenario—this shows how individual it is, as others have said—we had an employer who tried to pursue mediation quite aggressively in a dispute with an employee, which was not appropriate for that worker. We felt the best route was to support them in the employment tribunal, which we did successfully. So both are needed, but we need to raise awareness that it is not all about court.

Q79 Lord Waldegrave of North Hill: You are in the front line, and you have given a very eloquent and persuasive account of the problems with access to law and of other conflict resolution systems, their limitations and sometimes their strengths. I want to take you in a completely different direction and question you as citizens who see lots of the real world. Some of us as constituency MPs are out of date now. As a committee, we are trying to grapple with how the rule of law is perceived. Is it stronger? Do people buy into the concept? Are there beginning to be problems around that?

An issue I want to test your comments on, if you have anything to say, is the sense of immunity that may be out there. For example, if you win a civil case, then what? You feel you have won. People used to come to my constituency surgery and say, “I won. I won. I had that neighbours’ dispute that lasted three years. I won. But absolutely nothing has happened in the real world”. Secondly, there is a sense of immunity out there because an awful lot of people break the law and there does not appear to be any comeback.

This is an unpopular thing to say, but there was a very brilliant novel written about my old constituency by a young man called Moses McKenzie, entitled “An Olive Grove in Ends”. It is about gang culture in the middle of Bristol, where the concept of the law does not enter into anybody’s head much. The law is enforced by the gangs and the drug barons and so on. Some would say illegal immigration has the same effect on people: why should people jump the queue and so on? How much do you think the failure sometimes of us as lawmakers to enforce the law undermines people’s perception of the rule of law? Now, this is not so much to do with your expertise in your heroic day-to-day work, which all of us as constituency MPs relied on, but you know a lot about the real world. I would be interested if you had any comments on whether you think people are beginning to think that the law is a bit of a bluff in a lot of areas.

Sarah Matthews: I can talk personally and from the perspective of my previous role as a social worker, so not with my Citizens Advice hat on. I worked in child protection in Wrexham. At the time, a local authority estate experienced race riots—as they called them—which were massively whipped up by myths and misconceptions that were put about. Asylum seekers and refugees had been placed in a really deprived community. There were rumours that they were getting TVs and this and that, which brought up a great deal of resentment towards them. People were saying, “They have come here illegally and yet they are getting all these things”. But none of it was true. So there is a real thing about misconceptions. We all—the press, society—need to think about how that is whipped up. There are a lot of misconceptions out there.

Again, I worked in the criminal justice system as a social worker. Offenders are a group that does not receive proper advice. At the minute, they are provided with information and signposting. The Government now want to have more community-based orders. If you do not give that vulnerable client group good debt or housing advice so they are not homeless when they come out of prison, and help to manage and navigate the welfare system, what are the chances they are going to re-offend? I would say they are really high. That is another area that I am passionate about: that there should be good provision of advice services. At the minute, there is an inequity where certain groups seem to be perceived as not deserving of proper advice. Does that some way answer your question?

Lord Waldegrave of North Hill: That is an interesting and important point, I agree.

Kate Pasfield: The Civil Justice Council is embarking on work around enforcement, because it is widely believed to be a problem that you get a judgment in court and you cannot enforce it. It is looking at that whole problem. Clients tend to come up against the law only when it works against them in some way. People do not notice when it works in their favour in everyday life. Generally speaking, once they come up against a legal problem, it is something that is there to make their life difficult.

Nimrod Ben-Cnaan: There is an additional issue here. I heard the Attorney-General speak about this in the autumn. He talked about the need to strengthen the rule of law culture in this country. But it is much more grassroots than that. As Kate and Sarah said, people do not necessarily think of their situations in terms of the rights and the law in the first place. It may be out of ignorance because they have not had the legal education or information, but for the most part it is not a part of their life except when it is being used against them. That sense of alienation from the law—that “justice is not for the likes of us”, that the courts are open only to rich people who can lawyer up—as a perception is pernicious. It may not have any foundation in personal experience.

Lord Waldegrave of North Hill: I quite understand that, and that is well documented in all sorts of ways. In terms of our belief in the law and the fairness of our society, do you think there is a rise in the perception that there is one law for the rich, one law for the poor, but also one law for the local drug boss, who may also incidentally control a lot of the bad housing and so on? Nobody seems to bother him—it is usually a him—very much, or the gangs that sweep into a struggling shop in the city centre; out they go, and two days later a young police officer may come along and take a statement. That is pretty damaging for the perception of the rule of law, is it not?

Nimrod Ben-Cnaan: It would be.

Lord Waldegrave of North Hill: It happens, does it not?

Sarah Matthews: I have been a social worker, but I come from a family of police officers, although I have never been one. In terms of their capacity—I am not sure if this is true now—a couple of years ago I was aware that Greater Manchester Police was grading calls 1 to 5, and it only had capacity to attend grade 1 calls. Those would be in the realms of a person still in situ in a burglary situation. Anything below that, it just did not have the capacity to attend to.

Lord Waldegrave of North Hill: It is worth remembering that fair enforcement is part of the rule of law.

Sarah Matthews: Yes.

Nimrod Ben-Cnaan: It does not necessarily have to be criminal law; I will give you an example. In the whole Greater Manchester region, with its 2.8 million residents and 10 local authorities, we have one law centre, and that is the only place where people can get free legal advice on employment law, most of which is not funded by legal aid. The capacity is 3.5 full-time equivalent for 2.8 million people, with employment rights that are about to become even more in number. The gap is such that, inasmuch as people are aware of it, it shatters people’s stake in the common good. That is my personal reckoning of it.

The Chair: Thank you all very much indeed. That brings us to the end of the evidence-taking session. On behalf of the committee, I thank you all very much indeed. It has been a wide-ranging debate about a whole range of subjects which we shall consider. We will look at the written report that comes out and then decide on how to take it forward within our own report. Thank you very much indeed.