Labour peer Lord Bach, a former legal aid minister and a former Shadow Spokesperson on Justice, proposed a motion on welfare benefits advice and the government’s failure to make good its earlier promise to introduce legal aid in complex benefits cases. Baroness Grey-Thompson, a crossbench peer, put down a motion on her concerns over the compulsory telephone gateway, which she believed failed to ‘deliver sufficiently wide access to legal aid services for disabled persons’. The third motion was proposed by the former Attorney General, Labour peer Baroness Scotland. She warned that the regulations on qualifying for legal aid in domestic violence cases were too restrictive and would lead to domestic violence victims being ‘exposed to an increased risk of injury and death’.

After peers backed all three motions, Lord Bach told Legal Action: ‘With only five days to go before the LASPO Act is implemented, we were really fighting against this legislation until the very end. While these regret motions do not force the government to change anything, they have further tarnished its reputation and shows that the Lords were deeply unhappy about this legislation.’

The chaotic way in which, at the last minute, secondary legislation in relation to the LASPO Act was rushed through parliament is, in the coming weeks, likely to lead to difficulties for practitioners who have to work with the new legal aid rules. At the time of writing, amendments to the criminal legal aid specification and the very high cost cases payment rates have not yet been published.