Business resumed.

I thank the Minister for her statement earlier. I am keen to hear the time frame, if indeed there is one, for the outworkings of the working group on wider reform, which Judge Burgess is chairing. Does the Minister feel on reflection that she could have done anything differently to avoid the delays that we now have in our justice system?

There are two phases to the working group's work. We hope that its first report — the interim report — will be completed by the end of March. That should allow us to package any low-hanging fruit in any of the areas that could be reformed, as well as any uplift in fees that is required in those areas, for inclusion in the secondary legislation, which we hope to bring forward in May. The working group will conclude its work in September of this year. Judge Burgess has said that it will take 20 weeks. He is working at pace to try to bring the work to a conclusion, as are we in the Department, because it is about trying to provide evidence that, as Judge Burgess acknowledged when he did his initial foundation review, is simply no longer available. We want to bottom out that work, get the information and make the changes that we can, and as soon as we can. We will have another opportunity in the autumn to look at the pieces that may take slightly longer to come together.

The Member asked how we might have approached the situation differently. Hindsight is always twenty-twenty. We have kept open our communication channels and continue to engage. I have continued to engage personally not just with the Criminal Bar Association (CBA) but with the Law Society, the Solicitors Criminal Bar Association (SCBA) and other parts of the Bar Council. It is important that we do that.

As for the speed with which we were able to bring forward the enabling access to justice programme, I will say that it is a complex and extensive piece of work. I do not think that it would have been the right approach to have hived off the criminal justice part of it. Doing so would have been to the detriment of the rest of the profession. It was important that we pulled together the stuff in the foundation review, the work that we had been doing on access to justice in civil and family cases and the wider piece of work that we are doing on reform. It was important that everything came as a package, because, to be clear, it would have been hard for me to have made the case to the Finance Minister, who, I notice, has left the Chamber — that is probably just as well, because he would probably agree — for a 16% uplift in isolation from any other changes made to the system. It is only as a package of measures that it stacks up.

I thank the Minister for her statement. Will she please explain the thinking behind the taxation reform?

As many Members will know, the issue with taxation at the moment is that it does not go through the Department's normal accountability and oversight processes. There is therefore a challenge with openness, accountability and transparency. It is important that we consider carefully how we can ensure that we have audit and accountability through normal government procedures. At the minute, there is no line of accountability to the Legal Services Agency (LSA) or to the Department's accounting officer. The Public Accounts Committee highlighted that as a concern in its 2017 report on managing legal aid. There is also very little predictability with the assessments and a very wide variance in them. That is one of the reasons that we need to look at taxation reform, which will enshrine legal aid fees in legislation to replace the current system of taxation. Doing that will make fees transparent, accountable and predictable, but, before any new system of remuneration is introduced, the usual statutorily required consultation processes will be undertaken. Relevant views and available evidence will be considered in order to ensure that the new arrangements are fully compliant with all the statutory criteria. Representative bodies have been engaged, and will continue to be engaged, throughout the reform process. The Department remains cognisant of its duty when introducing any alternative system of payment to have regard to the statutory criteria in the Access to Justice (NI) Order 2003 and the Legal Aid, Advice and Assistance (NI) Order 1981.

Does the Minister have the funding available to deliver the proposed additional £9·8 million uplift and the £3·5 million backdated uplift?

We have. For the first time since devolution, we have baselined an amount for legal aid that is equivalent to the predicted expenditure on legal aid. As Members will appreciate, around two thirds to three quarters of legal aid funding is normally baselined, and we then have to wait for monitoring rounds in the hope of getting the remainder of the money into the Department. That has knock-on effects right across the system. This year, we have managed to ring-fence the amount that we expect to spend in legal aid. Therefore, we have the resources required to be able to implement the uplifts and expenditure that we have, while not detracting from our ability to bring down the length of time that payments will take. We will be able to do both those things, which is another reason why I think that the CBA is missing the fact that we have made great progress.

One of the complaints has been the length of time that it takes to get paid. We are introducing interim payments, which means that barristers will see the results of the 16% uplift much more quickly than they might have done. We are also shortening the time frame within which we will be able to pay bills in-year, which, again, is good news for everybody in the profession. Thirdly, we are able to provide for the uplift of 16% across the board.

If I may, I will take the opportunity to mention the uplift for immigration practitioners, which your colleague Ms Ferguson had asked about. To be clear, I said earlier that we intended to uplift the immigration practitioners by more than 16%, and I will put a figure on that: 30% was the recommended uplift for immigration practitioners, not 10%. I do not know where that figure came from, but it is 30% for immigration practitioners. That is based on the outworkings of a review done in England and Wales earlier this year.

I thank the Minister for her detailed statement. Will she elaborate on the types of victims and witnesses who are "particularly vulnerable"? I think that they are mentioned on page 7 of the statement. Also, is the Department in a position to offer any assistance to those people while they wait for legal redress?

As the Member will appreciate, we are talking about category A cases, so those will be serious sexual offence cases, rape and murder. Those are some of the most complex cases, and some very vulnerable witnesses will be engaged in that process and will be experiencing trauma. They also tend to be cases that are much slower to bring to court because of the rigour of having to find all the evidence and meet the requirements. So, victims will often await trial for quite a lengthy period.

It will also include category D multi-defendant trials, which include some complex fraud, paramilitary or terrorism cases. Again, that has a particular knock-on effect on the stress of victims and witnesses.

There will also be some victims who are, in multiple ways, vulnerable. For health, medical and a whole host of other reasons, they may find themselves becoming increasingly vulnerable during trial. It can be due to age, health impairments or serious illness. In all those cases, people are incredibly vulnerable, and, often, the longer that they have to wait, the more difficult that it will be for them to be able to make their case.

The Member asked about the additional support that the Department can offer. As he knows, we fund Victim Support for the work that it does, and it has been leaning in very heavily to support victims who are waiting for a long time. I spoke earlier of the work that prosecutors and the victims and witness care unit in the Public Prosecution Service have been doing. They have had to redirect resources to that space to try to support and encourage victims, many of whom may have been reluctant in the beginning to take cases because of the intimate nature of the violence that they may have to speak about and who are considering withdrawing cooperation from the PPS, with all the consequences that not prosecuting such cases in court has not only for them but for us as a society.

Work is going on to try to support those victims and witnesses in order to ensure that we can manage and reduce the level of attrition that might otherwise be expected. However, I will be very candid: for some witnesses in some of those cases, the clock, because of their health, is literally ticking on their ability to give evidence in court, and I am really concerned that, unless the derogation is implemented swiftly, some of those cases may never reach court.

Minister, what is your assessment of the regulation of lawyers, complaints about them and the quality of service?

As I mentioned earlier, in the main, the public gets a quality service from the legal profession here in Northern Ireland. We have very high standards for our legal professionals, and they do very good work. That is welcome. However, there will always be a minority who are unhappy with how the legal profession has treated them or with the outcome of the advice that they received.

While the vast majority of stakeholders report feeling that the services that they have received were helpful and necessary and have been provided with care, those who feel that they have not been in receipt of such services will often also complain that they feel unable to make an effective complaint about their representative, if they feel that they need to, or that they are unaware of who to turn to when they feel that they have not been well served. I am keen to explore how governance structures for legal aid can be used in combination with the Law Society and the Bar Council as regulators and with the work of the Department of Finance and the Legal Services Oversight Commissioner to ensure that people are empowered to demand the quality of service to which they are entitled, particularly when it involves the expenditure of public money.

Certainly, I do not want to step into areas that regulatory bodies or the Minister of Finance already occupy, but it is about saying that, where we fund services for people through the Department of Justice and legal aid, we want to take responsibility for ensuring the quality of those services and that there is meaningful recourse for people when they do not feel well served. The fear for many is that, if they complain to the Bar Council or the Law Society, they will struggle to get their case taken seriously, because other solicitors and barristers make the judgement on whether the behaviour was appropriate. They may also fear that making a complaint might blot their copybook with future solicitors and barristers if they were then to look for alternative legal advice. Whilst that is a perception rather than a proven reality, it is a barrier to people's feeling confident about coming forward. There is, of course, the legal service's ombudsman's office to which people can go, but, again, we need to work with those in the profession who are already very engaged in trying to improve professionalism and the standards throughout it. We need to work closely with them to ensure that, where we can be of assistance either through legal aid or the Department of Finance, we are able to offer them that support in the work that they are trying to do.

Minister, it feels to me that the 16-page statement can be summarised as saying, "It is not me, it is them". Given that you and your party have held the Department for the past 15 years, it is a very sorry position that you now appear to be at open war with the criminal Bar. Is bringing a statement like that to the Assembly really the best way to conduct negotiations?

The Member clearly did not hear my answer to his colleague Mr McNulty, who asked basically the same question, word for word, before lunchtime.

First, as I said, I am not at war with the criminal Bar; I am in negotiation and discussion with it about how we take things forward. There is no sense that the statement is about warfare, nor is it about me negotiating with the Bar, which is a separate issue. I am engaging with the Bar. The statement is about me informing MLAs about the work that we have conducted in the Department and the changes that we have made to the programme as presented to the House in December. It is also about updating MLAs on the progress that has been made against the targets that I set out at that time. It is entirely appropriate that, whilst maintaining contact with the Bar and trying to resolve the outstanding issues, I come to the House and keep Members informed, because let us be honest about this: the Bar is quite happy to keep Members informed, so it is important that they also hear what the Department has been doing so that they are aware of the work that my officials and I have invested as we seek to resolve the issue.

Making the statement and setting out what we have tried to achieve in the Department in, I would argue, much greater detail than Mr O'Toole suggested, does not preclude me from continuing to engage with the Bar. In fact, if he reads the statement, which he summarised poorly, he would see that I paid tribute to the criminal Bar and other professionals for getting involved in the working group and that I very much welcomed the opportunity to engage with them further.

I thank the Minister for her statement, which told us, amongst other things, that Judge Burgess is leading a working group on the issues that have been discussed today. Will the Minister give us any insight into Judge Burgess's views on her response to his recommendations and the Criminal Bar Association's response?

Judge Burgess anticipated the working group when he produced the Burgess review, as it has become known. I will explain the history to Members. There used to be a direct time-and-line equation through which you could work out the length of time that people spent on things and how much they were paid. That practice was broken from in favour of the simplification of payment so that people would not have to account for every minute of every day in the way in which they previously had to. Instead, they would be paid a certain set amount for particular kinds of work.

As a result, the complexity of cases, which other Members have referred to, can no longer, in general, be measured in the same way. Of course, there are exceptions for things such as reading excess amounts of discovery. The idea behind that was to simplify the system for practitioners as well as for the Legal Services Agency and to ensure that, swings and roundabouts, people would, overall, be paid appropriately.

The issue that Judge Burgess raised was that he does not now have available to him the kind of evidence that he would need to support the uplift that would be required for the more complex cases. He acknowledged that that would be needed, and the working group is taking that forward. Otherwise, the review's recommendations have been accepted; some with the caveat that we will have to await the evidence and some with the caveat that we will need to take some time to work through the logistics. There is nothing, however, that we have rejected.

Indeed, when I met him, Judge Burgess indicated that by backdating the uplift to December, I have gone further than he recommended or anticipated, and he welcomed that. Fundamentally, however, as I said in my statement, I do not believe that Judge Burgess would continue to work with me and the Department if he felt that we were not respecting the spirit and integrity of the review or were ignoring his recommendations, which were based on his engagement with the Criminal Bar Association, the Law Society and the Bar Council.

Thank you, Minister. Will the Minister explain the issue that led to immigration solicitors withdrawing their services? What subsequent engagement has she had with them?

The issue with immigration solicitors withdrawing their services is one that, obviously, causes us some concern. It ties in with the increasing complexity of immigration and asylum cases. As the Member will know, the landscape around immigration and asylum under the previous Government and the current Government has been constantly evolving, and the work that immigration solicitors have to do to prepare work for their clients and to be able to prepare representation for them has become much more involved, complex and time-consuming over that period.

We had looked at an uplift of 16% for legal aid work across the professions. However, we were aware that a discrete piece of work was carried out in England and Wales that looked at immigration because practitioners there were particularly under pressure. The outcome of that was the suggestion that we consider an uplift of around 30% to the fees paid to immigration solicitors. The engagement that we have had on the work that those immigration solicitors are doing has been very positive. They have set out three proposals for resolution and we are responding to those with our own analysis and calculations. It is the Department's intention to get agreement on a way forward before the end of this month and ahead of the drafting of the secondary legislation, which we hope to bring to the Chamber in May 2025. That will allow the solicitors, at the earliest opportunity, to benefit from the uplift to which they are entitled. That is my intention.

The proposed fees will not address all the issues. There are some issues that relate to supply in this area. However, this is an important first step in stabilising immigration practice. We will then need to look at some of the other consultations that we are doing on increasing retention in that space and looking at how we can provide additional mechanisms for people to get the support that they need, whether that is through legal aid or otherwise. We are engaging robustly on that at the moment, and I am hopeful, still, that we will be able to get a resolution to that well ahead of the May deadline.

Thank you, Minister. That concludes questions on the statement from the Minister of Justice. I invite Members to take their ease while we get ready for the statement from the Minister of Agriculture, Environment and Rural Affairs.