Part of the debate – in the Senedd at 3:36 pm on 5 November 2019.
Llywydd, can I thank Mick Antoniw for that? He began by pointing to the impressive nature of the panel. And when I had the privilege of helping to introduce the report on the day that it was launched, I remember saying that I thought that one of the key jobs that Ministers—and, in this case, the former First Minister—had to carry out, in getting this sort of work going, is to choose the right people to do it. And those are difficult decisions very often. But if you look at the panel who made up this commission, those decisions were very wise indeed, and have led to the report that we have today.
Mick Antoniw made a very important point, and it's here in the report, that, in the 1945 welfare state settlement, access to justice was a fundamental strand in the way those who were creating new rights for people—new social rights, in the Marshall sense, but new rights to justice as well—this was an integral part of the way that they thought citizenship rights in the United Kingdom would be discharged in the future. And the cuts that we have seen in the last decade, those cuts to legal aid and other access to justice aspects, are laid bare in this report. If you wanted to read no other paragraphs in it, read what this report says about litigants in person—people who are forced to represent themselves in court, because they have no access to advice, nobody else to speak up for them, the terrible burden that that places on them, and the way it slows down the whole court system, because they have to be helped from the bench repeatedly to understand what is going on and to make the points that they are entitled to make. It's such a false economy, isn't it, because it just throws costs into other parts of the system?
I was struck during the discussion, Llywydd, at how much more some Members here know about aspects of the justice system than I do. Mick Antoniw's idea of a Welsh legal aid system of course is one that we will want to look at as we take this forward. The report says, in that chapter 3, on access to justice, that the Welsh Government has had to divert money
'to address functions that were not devolved instead of using the resources for functions that had been devolved'.
And it then says that this
'was the right thing to do.'
But it wasn't—it shouldn't have been the necessary thing to do. But we will now be able to use some of that experience, and the funding that we have provided to third sector organisations, in that new system that Mick Antoniw has outlined this afternoon.