28/04/2013 The Wales Report

racing interval of access to justice under threat because of radical

changes to legal aid? There was better news for the British economy

this week. No triple-dip recession. But is the Welsh economy feeling the

benefit? And would more ethnic diversity in public life combat

Wales Report, where we look at the issues of lives throughout Wales and

question some of the decisions. Tonight we start with the right of

every individual to access justice. The UK has one of the most expensive

legal aid regimes in the world, �2 billion a year. Ministers believe

that is not defensible when pressure on Government budgets is so intense.

Legal aid is being removed from entire cases of civil law including

some family cases in order to make cuts. Ministers insist it is right,

despite protests from senior Justice is supposed to be accessible

to all, rich or poor. And in the past, each year, 25,000 people

across Wales have used legal aid to help them pay for advice and

lawyers. That huge cuts to the legal aid budget, which came into effect

earlier this month, will change all that. Legal aid no longer applies to

entire areas of civil law, including some family and medical negligence

cases, and lawyers here in Wales are warning that could have serious

consequences, not just for the legal profession but crucially for people

who need financial help in accessing justice. People like the Weaver

family from Bridgend. Emily Weaver is now 26. She was born with

cerebral palsy but when she was two doctors failed to spot that a tube

training fluid from her brain had blocked. The difference between

Emily before and Emily after that happened was heartbreaking. After

the incident, it was literally like bringing home some one who was

lined, death and like a plank of wood. -- lined and death and like a

plank of wood. Legal aid funded the family's medical negligence claim

which gave the family equipment and help for the rest of her life.

is now able to have everything she needs. She needs sensory equipment

and sensory programmes. We were not able to give her any of that

before. What would you have done without legal aid? I do not think we

could have done anything. I do not think anyone could understand how

traumatic being a parent and care of somebody like Emily is. Every day

you are living a nightmare. So legally, coming along at that time

am a was our saviour and Emily's saviour. Now the changes to legal

aid in civil law are in place, next the UK governments want to reform

legal aid and the criminal law. Barristers across Wales have said

enough is enough. This week, the Wales and Chester circuit of

barristers voted unanimously to strike at the UK Government's

proposals. The justice system in Wales is in danger. The effect of

these cuts to Wales in particular would be absolutely devastating.

Freedom of choice will go. The provision of legal services in Wales

will be very much reduced. People will be denied access to justice. We

take this very seriously. This is not a hollow threat. This is a

threat that the Government will see coming into force sooner rather than

later. So in future, will more and more people without legal aid or

money for a lawyer end up being forced to come to court themselves

to argue their case? The bar Council certainly thinks so. They have even

issued a new guide to representing yourself in court. It is full of

handy hints and tips about what to bring to court, including key

documents and highlighter pens. It even tells me to dress for success.

And it does have quite a lot of information about the law in it, but

what it cannot give anyone is a legal qualification or years of

experience. For parents like John Weaver, the idea of DIY justice is a

nonstarter. Could you possibly have represented yourself? It is hard

work for any solicitor to represent us in a complex case like Emily's

was. No way I could have done that. Fighting for Emily on a day-to-day

basis is one thing. Standing in court and trying to do that is

another. So without legal aid, without the solicitors that we used,

we could not have had the result but we have got. In a statement, the UK

jail and -- the UK Government's justice minister defended the

be a turbulent time for the legal system. There may well be short-term

savings, but for a growing number of professional legal bodies and

families like the weavers, the long-term effects will be nothing

short of devastating. What do you think of the changes? In a word,

unethical. At the very least I am very disappointed. At the most I am

very angry. To attack the most vulnerable people in society, people

who already have a great disadvantage...

The controversy surrounding the cases was very much in evidence at

yesterday's Welsh Conservative Party conference in Swansea. Andrew Taylor

insisted on asking the Justice Secretary, Chris Grayling, a

question after his speech. I would like to tell the Welsh people about

the losses that are likely to come about as a result of his law

reforms. We are having to take tough and difficult decisions and I know

different to the Ministry of Justice are having to take tough and

difficult decisions, so we are making changes to legal aid, to the

way we read our prisons, in our courts to bring down costs. There is

no option. The alternative is the Labour way which is to carry on

spending the money the same way, pass on huge debts to our children

and leave the country in the kind of crisis we are seeing in other parts

of Europe, and I am not prepared to do that.

You do not need to be a lip reader to see that Mr Taylor was not

entirely convinced by that response. Joining me is a consultant solicitor

advocate and a former member of the Law Society Council. The legal aid

system is eye watering the expensive. It needs radical reform,

and that is what you are getting. do not agree, nor do many other

experts. If you go back to 1991, the last time a Government try to

introduce price competitive tendering, it is what is going to

affect solicitors and barristers, there were 1400 firms of solicitors.

We are now down to far fewer than that and we are now going to be

asked to reduce it in total to 400 firms of solicitors for the whole of

England and the. And you more concerned about the impact on your

profession than on people's ability to access justice? I think they go

hand-in-hand. Access to Justice will be virtually impossible. Let's take

two areas that are going to be badly affected. Industrial South Wales, as

it was, is going to be one procurement area. There are 1.25

million people living in that area. I suspect the number of firms

servicing that area at the moment is somewhat over 40. It will come down

to eight to cover all of those people and that whole area, and that

system is going to be applied equally to rural areas. In my area

there are 515,000 people in an area that covers 4500 square miles. At

present, probably something in the region of 22 or 23 firms that do a

measure of criminal legal aid work. That will come down to four. And the

worst of this is that the client will not have a choice. You will not

go to the solicitor you have had before. What will happen is you will

go on an automated system which is replacing the call centre, and they

will allocate you a provider. But what they are going to do now is

literally sweep the legs from under the system, because you are going to

find a lot of firms going to the wall, giving up, and there will not

be access to justice. But ministers would come back and say again those

who need it will have access to it. This reform is about stripping it

away from those who do not really need. I do not agree. Let's have a

look at the barristers who very sensibly issued a guide to people to

do their own cases. That will happen. There will not be solicitors

available. A lot of people will have to represent themselves. I applaud

the bar Council for issuing the guide they have but I have to point

out that quite a number of my clients are not able to read will

stop a number of them would be absolutely flummoxed if they were

put before a court and told to present their own case. How can the

Government have an adversarial system when you are in a situation

where one of the adversarial is does not have the appropriate weapon? It

is like putting a person into a gunfight with a banana against a man

with a machine gun. When will we see the practical results of what you

say will happen when these changes go through? -- if these changes go

through? I am told that the changes will be implemented in Dover. A lot

of the firms will say, we cannot do it. And I agree with Andrew,

rubbish. So the UK economy has afforded a

triple-dip recession after recording 0.3% growth in the first three

months of the year, according to the Office for National Statistics. One

minister David Cameron says that the economy is healing, but does that

apply to Wales, to? Figures show the people in Wales have the second

lowest disposable income in the UK. Of course there have been difficult

decisions but in Wales there are 39,000 more people in work and there

were at the time of the election. There are 30,000 fewer people on out

of work benefits. So it is healing. It does take time. Getting the

deficit down is difficult. What welfare changes are about is trying

to make sure people have access to a job. The best way out of poverty is

work. The Labour way of doing things where you park people on incapacity

benefit and you leave them there, never doing anything to help them,

is wrong. We are spending sometimes up to 14,000 on one individual to

help them find work, so this is the right thing to do. Labour tried to

prove the point that you can just heel problems with benefits. You

cannot. The way is to help people by helping them get work. A very

forthright message from David Cameron, speaking yesterday. Joining

us is Gerald Holtham, economic adviser to the Welsh Government.

With me in the studio, Emma Watkins, director of CBI country. Is the

economy healing, as David Cameron says it is? It is pretty flat still.

It is tough out there that we can see a light at the end of the

tunnel. 0.3% growth or 0.3% down is marginalise away. Businesses are

rolling up their sleeves and working hard, but we can see a chink of

light. Healing or not? I do not know. There is a great mystery about

this which is there has been some rise in employment and some decline

in unemployment despite the fact there has been virtually no growth.

The economy is still more than 2% lower than it was before the last

recession five years ago. We are producing less output now than we

were five or six years ago and yet, as he rightly says, employment has

gone up. Nobody quite knows why. One factor certainly is that it is

low-grade employment. There are more people working part-time, people

taking worst jobs, graduates working in McDonald's, all that sort of

thing, and wages are down. Inflation is running faster than wages so

instead of taking people through unemployment we are taking them

through lower pay. How long can that continue? If growth does not pick

up, will this decline in earnings go on or will that start to be a rise

in an employment which has not happened so far? What are your

members telling you about what is needed to Mack -- what is needed?

Businesses are not yet interesting. But there is one key thing and that

is an investment in infrastructure from UK Government and Welsh

Government. We need to see action. We need investment in big industrial

projects. We talked about the need to improve the M4 relief road. We

also need to see a used in the construction market. For every

pounds you spend in construction you get �2 84 back. That is a big

return. And in terms of employment and jobs. It is all about the

infrastructure but about delivering on it. Is the Welsh Government doing

all it can to kick-start investment to Mack -- is the Government doing

all it can to kick-start There are certain things that have

already been done but they would like to do more. What about the way

businesses are prepared to invest in their own industry? Is there an

incentive or even a disincentive that would force them to do more

than they are doing? The Government could temper actually increase the

business allowances it gives to businesses to invest. Maybe it

could temporarily raised, not lower, but raised the rate of corporation

tax. People will have horror as if you say that but if you temporarily

raised ate and offset it with generous investment allowances.

That would give businesses in a pincer where they would have the

incentive to bring investments forward. Why would business need to

that kind of Carrick on stick approach? What is the reluctance

when everyone knows what the benefits of investing are? I think

that was a very good point about incentivise Asian. It is about

prescribing investment or incentivising it. It is a lack of

confidence. The difficult thing is that many of the levers like beyond

the Welsh or a UK Government. There is a lot of stuff out there that is

about with our control. If Germany sneezes and we will catch the flu.

The figures this week were helpful. You might increase that confidence.

Are you really in the position where you want people to start

spending more money. The latest figures short that disposable

spending en Wales is the second lowest of any part of the United

Kingdom. Really can we expect people to spend more money to kick-

start the economy? The answer is No. Not only our household incomes not

rising, they are being squeezed. People still have a hundred and 40%

of their annual income in debt. The household sector got to indebted.

It is saving more now but it has a long way to go. That is not going

to be the engine that drives the recovery in the near term. I think

that is why we need some infrastructure investment,

something else, to move the economy forward. Thank you both very much.

Tomorrow brings the publication of a report into historical child

abuse in children's homes in North Wales. Running parallel with the

inquiry is a separate investigation following claims the Waterhouse

Inquiry did not go far enough to uncover the truth. We can speak to

our reporter who investigated this extensively in the 1990s. It is a

sad story of historic child abuse in North Wales. Two reports will

land on the desk of the Home Secretary and another will land on

the desk of the chief constable. That will be the end of phase one

of this report. The director general of the National crime

agency has 27 very experienced police officers looking at how the

police investigated it going back to the 70s and possibly the 60s.

Most importantly they are listening to new allegations and we will hear

tomorrow what that team has found. My understanding is that it is

anything up to 150 people who have come forward. I understand a lot of

new allegations are being made and the response will be to that. The

chief constable will then have to decide whether or not to act on

that report. Let us help viewers grew that a little more. There are

two enquiries, I the overlapping each other? They do overlap but

they are separate. One is looking at the police allegations. The

other one is overseen by the High Court judge and they are looking

into the Waterhouse inquiry which itself was a very long inquiry. It

went on for three years, cost �30 million, took hundreds of witnesses

and came to certain conclusions. It created some good things like the

children's Commissioner for Wales. There were suggestions that perhaps

it went outside children's homes in the private and public sector. The

justice is looking at that aspect of it and they will be talking to

one another otherwise there would not be much point. There is that

you out there that what is going on is that the Waterhouse Inquiry is,

in effect, being reopened. Not re- run but some of the questions are

being asked again and new questions are being posed. Is that a fair

summary? It is. It will take a long time. I spoke to the team this week

and they were seeing the have a huge paper exercise. -- saying.

They have to listen to what is new in addition to that. This programme

made certain statements and brought things to their attention last

November concerning the way that the privately run homes may have

been concerned. I have given evidence do it so in a sense we are

directly involved. Those are the sorts of things we will be

listening to. At the moment, the timescale is open ended so we do

not know when that is coming. us talk about culture, you mention

it going back to the 70s and possibly 60s. How do you think the

culture of listening and taking victims seriously has changed?

Firstly at that time they were not believed, I am talking about young

people who were trying to raise their voices and say that something

was wrong. They were not being believed. Then the whistleblowers

who tried to raise the subject on their behalf were not believed and

then people like us who were trying to report were not believed. That

is changing. The point of view now is that they have to be supported,

now and if the process of law takes its place, there could be arrests.

People could be brought to book, brought to justice. It does not

mean to say they are guilty, they have a right to apply and that will

take a long, long time. Everybody is now very anxious to make sure

that these people who have had their lives destroyed in some cases

are listened to and supported. That is where we go next. What can we

expect to see in terms of action that is measurable? The chief

constable will have no choice but to act on the recommendations of

what the Palace will officers have found. -- Palu Eyl inquiry officers.

Minority communities make up 7% of the population of Wales yet some

feel areas still work to be done to improve their part in Welsh life.

The Welsh Government has told us it is serious about their equality. A

barrister with Civitas has been sharing her experiences as a Welsh

Muslim living in the capital. Here is Mona Bayoumi. Historically, the

UK has been one of the most progressive countries in Europe

introducing provisions to protect against discrimination from as

early as the 1960s. However, prejudice is still rife in our

communities with certain groups becoming increasingly marginalised

and individuals suffering from hate crimes. As a Muslim living in Wales