Labour MP calls for national legal service

Access to justice needs to be engrained in the public's conscience, much like the NHS, says Austin Mitchell

Congratulations are in order for the Society of Labour Lawyers: they've got their election manifesto out before the Labour party, and how like a new Labour party manifesto it is. No sweeping reforms. No expensive programmes to roll out legal services into advice deserts. Labour's legal think tank has only affordable ambitions: implementing legislation not yet in effect, reordering priorities, managing expectations, more clarity, reorientation, high-tech access to databases. Making capitalism responsible. Big improvements are ruled out; they cost too much.

Child abuse, the NHS, serious fraud, energy - the issues at the forefront of public debate are analysed, defective policies identified and remedies proposed, but nothing suggested is likely to damage Labour's image of financial timidity (saving maybe an encouraging suggestion to take energy companies into public ownership). In particular, there's no mention of our failing the criminal legal aid system. No more money for civil legal aid except what can be squeezed out of the criminal pot.

In fact, though, the lawyers in parliament and the lawyers in the courts have contrived almost the biggest criminal legal aid bill in the world and - at even greater expense - the highest prison population in western Europe. About this enormous waste, Labour Lawyers have almost nothing to say.

That is a shame, since justice for the less well-off, (those exploited at work, by payday loan sharks, in trouble with the police or in matrimonial breakdown, battling with an insurance company or a landlord), is less accessible than at any time since the Second World War. We should provide a new civil right giving access to justice, just as there are rights to healthcare and education. How much easier it would have been to protect legal services now, if after the war Labour had set up the 250 law centres Lord Rushcliffe proposed. Instead it gave legal aid to the Law Society, which doled it out to its members. Subsidised high-street practices could never hope to get the affection the public shows to local hospitals, schools, post offices or citizens advice bureaux. Slashing legal services has been easy. By contrast, state institutions are popular and closing them is difficult. That's why the Tories are privatising them - they are preparing them for the axe.

We can avoid this. We must reform the criminal justice system. That would help finance a national Legal Service operating through national networks of public defenders and law centres, locally managed and answerable to the Legal Aid Agency.

We need to make criminal justice more inquisitorial, focusing on evidence and not on procedure. The legal obsession with confrontation is an expensive business and a duplication of effort. We need more professional magistrates probing into the facts and directing lines of enquiry. We should aim to have speedier trials and more efficient courts. We should dust off Lord Justice Auld's recommendations on streamlining court processes. And, most of all, we need to reform sentencing policy and reduce the prison population. If we sentenced offenders in the same way as the Scandinavians (who impose imprisonment only for the more serious offences), we could halve our prison population and find the money we need to set up the kind of legal service Rushcliffe dreamed of.

Making capitalism responsible is too modest an ambition. Sweeping reforms to open justice to the people are possible. Let's roll out a national legal service.

Austin Mitchell is Labour MP for Great Grimsby