Live coverage as controversial justice bill is accidentally published early
• Read the bill here
Clarke is now talking about legal aid. It is the most expensive system in the world, apart from in Northern Ireland. It costs £39 per head. In New Zealand the figure is £8 per head.
The last government reviewed the system 30 times since 2006, he says. But it did not sort out the system.
Under the new plan, legal aid will be retained where life or liberty is at stake. And it will be retained for special needs cases.
But it won't be available for most private family law cases. And it won't be available to squatters.
Clarke says his plans will retain "common sense" in the justice system. On legal aid, he will achieve "substantial savings".
Clarke is still speaking. He confirms that there will be mandatory sentences for threatening someone with a knife, that squatting will be made illegal and that the law on self-defence will be clarified.
On sentence discounts, he says he has decided to retain the present system.
Indeterminate sentences do not work as parliament intended. Thousands of prisoners serve their normal tariffs, but no one can predict when they will be released.
Instead, there will be more life sentences.
Kenneth Clarke is making his statement now. Colleague Andrew Sparrow writes:
He says he launched two consultations last year, on sentencing and on legal aid. Today he is publishing a bill to take forward these plans.
Protecting the public from crime is one of the most fundamental duties of the state. But after Labour, with 20 criminal justice bills and the creation of more than 3,000 offences, the system is in chaos.
Re-offending rates are dreadful, he says.
Prisons "must be places of both punishment and reform".
• Clarke says he will introduce a full working week across the prison estate.
Addiction will be reduced in prisons. Drug-free wings will be introduced in jails. Taxpayers' money will only be spend on rehabilitation programmes that work.
The Law Society's head of legal aid, Richard Miller, has spotted that clause 12 of the bill introduces an "interests of justice test" for police station advice.
At the moment, anyone is entitled to free advice in the police station if they are arrested (for example at protests against the cuts). For minor cases they will get only telephone advice, for more major cases they will get a lawyer in the police station for any interview.
Clause 12 appears to say that you will only get advice in the police station if the Government decides in the individual case that it is in the interests of justice for you to do so.
This is not only an assault on the rights of citizens, it is also a logistical nightmare to operate in practice.
Ken Clarke is due to give an oral statement providing details of the bill shortly. We'll be providing live coverage with Andrew Sparrow but you can watch it live on Parliament TV here.
Anthony Hurndall, founder and director of the Centre for Justice has echoed warnings about decreasing access to justice:
"This is a further erosion of one of the three central pillars of the welfare state – free access to justice. It is reported that more than 500,000 people will no longer qualify for legal aid under the proposed changes and it will be abandoned all together in areas that have long been assumed as safe from attack.
Ironically, as David Cameron talks of the need for a big society, this move will lead to more injustice and greater loss of social cohesion, as legal aid is no longer available and advice centres close through lack of funding."
For those having problems keeping up with the coalition's climbdowns, colleagues Tom Clark and Paddy Allen have mapped out the screeching reversals in policy.
Dame Anne Owers, formerly chief inspector of prisons from 2001 to 2010 and the current chair of the Transition to Adulthood Alliance said:
"The T2A Alliance welcomes the Prime Minister's remarks today that he wants to see more tough community sentences, instead of short prison sentences that are expensive and can be ineffective. We also welcome that he raised the fact that 30% of prisoners were once children in care of the state, and that this needs to be addressed.
"However, we are disappointed that the Bill contains no specific proposals to introduce systemic changes to improve the criminal justice system for young adults. 18-24 year olds account for just ten percent of the population, but they account for a third of those sentenced to prison each year, a third of the probation service case load and a third of the total economic and social costs of crime. Half re-offend within a year of release from prison, which clearly shows an urgent need for reform to support young people in their transition to adulthood to move away from crime."
A criminologist from the University of Kent has warned that the u-turn on 50% sentence cuts will cost taxpayers and victims of crime. Professor Alex Stevens said:
"Justice secretary Ken Clarke's retreat on his sentencing proposals may win some short term political advantage for the government. But in the long term, the tax payer and future victims of crime will pay for it.This is because his u-turn leaves a funding hole of over £100 million in his plans. The government apparently proposes dealing with this by delaying cuts to the ministry of justice budget, by imposing deeper cuts to probation services, and by further restricting access to legal aid. This will mean that we will be spending more on ineffective prison sentences and less on effective community punishments. It also means that people who desperately need professional legal advice will be unable to get it.
The package of measures that David Cameron announced this morning will add to these problems. All of them will cost extra money, and none of them have any evidence that they will cut crime.
Instead of caving in to the tabloids and the Labour Party's opportunistic attacks, the government should have taken the chance to make real changes to reduce spending and protect the public from reoffending."
The human rights organisation, JUSTICE, has expressed its concerns that the legal aid reforms will lead to "economic cleansing" of the courts. They warn that the poor will be excluded from the courts "as a result of the combined effect of major cuts to legal aid and proposals to privatise many small claims through mandatory mediation."
Roger Smith OBE, JUSTICE's director, said:
We face the economic cleansing of the civil courts. Courts and lawyers will be only for the rich. The poor will make do as best they can with no legal aid and cheap, privatised mediation. There will be no equal justice for all – only those with money.
In this morning's written ministerial statement from Ken Clarke, he announced that "people will instead use alternative, less adversarial means of resolving their problems (notably, in divorce cases, where the taxpayer will still fund mediation)." He continued, "Fundamental rights to access to justice will be protected through retention of certain areas of law within scope and a new exceptional funding scheme for excluded cases."
As we reported at 2.07pm, the decision to broaden the definition of domestic violence follows criticism that it would create a "perverse incentive" to make false allegations. November's green paper proposed that divorce cases would only be publicly funded where it can be shown that a man or woman is facing domestic violence or forced marriage. A justice select committee warned ministers to rethink these plans in March this year.
Legal aid expert, SteveHynes, director of LAG has also commented:
"These legal aid cuts are penny wise, but pound foolish. The bulk of them fall on the sort of face to face advice services which can deal with legal problems before they spiral out of control and lead to expensive court cases.
LAG calculates that the £49m in legal aid cuts to housing, welfare benefits, debt and employment will ultimately cost the government £286.2 million in costs to other public services. In other words, £1 of expenditure on civil legal help saves the government around £6 in other public expenditure.
Advice on benefits for example is excluded from the legal aid scheme under the Bill (see schedule 1 part 2 s15). At a time when the government is in the process of introducing the Welfare Reform Bill they are cutting off people's means to get advice on benefits. It's hard not to conclude this is a conspiracy against the very poorest to deny them access to justice."
In the comments, PeterWalshAvMA writes:
It does seem to include the scrapping of legal aid for many of the most vulnerable in society, including victims of clinical negligence. Does anyone know when, where , how the Bill is being launched / presented?
The ministry of justice have said that Ken Clarke will make an oral statement at 3.30 today, announcing the detail of the bill. The responses to the consultation will be published at the same time and the bill itself will follow the statement. We'll be covering it live here. Although we have published a leaked copy of the bill, we'll have the explanatory notes and impact assessment later this afternoon.
Michael White was also watching David Cameron's press conference this morning. He notes that a prime minister has to be on top of a huge range of policies at events like these.
It's easy to be caught in ignorance or error when bluffing isn't enough. Cameron's plans for tougher sentences — and no 50% remission for those who plead guilty early, as Clarke had proposed – will all cost money.
But when BBC Newsnight pointed that out he hid behind our old friend "efficiency savings" to be made at the MoJ. At £45,000 a head a year, the slammer is a costly option – almost twice the cost of Eton, but an inferior education. Cameron is right to say public confidence must be maintained, but this is pandering. And familiar talk of rehabilitation is just that.
Further to Alan Travis's post at 1.31pm, @rpkaye has just pointed out on Twitter:
@alantravis40 The mandatory 6-month sentence for knife offenders is at s. 113(6)
Owen Bowcott, legal affairs correspondent, writes:
There have been several changes to the government's earlier proposals on restricting legal aid. Steve Hynes of the Legal Action Group spotted that the definition of domestic violence in family disputes has been broadened to include providing legal support to those who have suffered psychological abuse. The shift is in line with recent judgments.
Critics of the bill pointed out that granting legal aid only those who endured physical attacks from partners would provide a perverse incentive for anyone in divorce proceedings to exaggerate their domestic ordeals, further embittering separations.
Legal aid to help children with special educational needs has also been restored. Excluding it would have saved the Ministry of Justice barely £1 million and would have caused a political outcry. Legal aid for those pursuing judicial reviews on behalf of third parties has also been removed, Hynes noticed. It will close off an avenue for those those taking human rights cases on behalf of others.
Today's controversial justice bill, now called legal aid, sentencing and punishment bill, comes after weeks of delay. The proposals for legal aid were published in November last year (read Afua Hirsch's analysis of the green paper here), followed by plans for sentencing reforms in December, when Clarke unveiled his "rehabilitation revolution".
Read Alan Travis's analysis here:
When Clarke announced his "rehabilitation revolution", he promised to reverse decades of Conservative and Labour policy of simply "banging up more and more people".
At the heart of the justice secretary's plan was a package of measures designed to reduce annual demand for prison places by 6,000. The proposal increasing the maximum discount for early pleas to 50% was a crucial part of that package, as it expected to deliver 3,200 of those 6,000 savings in prison places.
When the guilty plea discount ran into fierce political turbulence, Clarke fought hard to keep the proposal intact by ensuring that exemptions were limited to rapists, murderers, child sex offenders and other serious offenders. Cameron acknowledged this morning that they looked at keeping it for less serious offenders. But Clarke lost that battle, too.
The sentencing reforms began to crumble after Clarke appeared to suggest that some forms of rape were less serious than others, when discussing his plans to increase discounts for early guilty pleas last month.
Alan Travis, the Guardian's home affairs editor, writes:
The copy of the legal aid, sentencing and punishment bill we have seen confirms that many of the measures that have already been trailed, such as community orders with curfews, travel bans and the diversion of mentally ill offenders and those with drug and alcohol problems, are in the legislation. It also includes new "honesty in sentencing" instructions for judges and measures to ensure those on remand are not unnecessarily held in custody.
But it does not include some of the most high profile measures announced by David Cameron at his press conference this morning, including a new mandatory prison sentence for aggravated knife crime, a mandatory sentence for repeat serious sex and violent offenders and delaying the release of such prisoners until they are two thirds of the way through their sentence.
Also absent are the proposals to criminalise squatting and provide a new Tony Martin-style "self-defence" law for householders and others who apprehend burglars. This suggests that these measures were only agreed at the very last minute and have not yet been included in the bill.
Welcome to today's live blog on the legal aid, sentencing and punishment bill.
The bill – meant to be published this afternoon – was posted inadvertently on the parliament website this morning. Before it was taken down we downloaded a copy, which you can read here. Alan Travis and Owen Bowcott are currently reading through it and will have all the details here as soon as possible.
Here's Hélène Mulholland's story on David Cameron's U-turn over sentencing reform, and Andrew Sparrow has been analysing Cameron's speech here.
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Source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/law/butterworth-and-bowcott-on-law/2011/jun/21/legal-aid-and-sentencing-bill-live-blog
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