Legal aid update
Legal update: justice in freefall
Steve Hynes reports on the dire consequences of the civil legal aid cuts for access to justice and associated knock-on costs in other public services.
About the author
Steve Hynes is director of Legal Action Group.
L
egal Action Group (LAG) has just published Justice in freefall: a report on the decline of legal aid.* This report analysed the Ministry of Justice’s (MoJ’s ) legal aid statistics and other evidence on the impact of the Legal Aid, Sentencing and Punishment of Offenders (LASPO) Act 2012. LAG believes that since the LASPO Act was implemented in April 2013, the MoJ has been cutting civil legal aid more than it originally intended to leaving large budget underspends and even larger advice deserts while, at the same time, surrounding the system with ever more suffocating and costly bureaucracy. See also page 18 of this issue.
Justice in freefall paints pretty bleak picture. The LASPO Act cuts to legal aid have meant that many people with housing, benefits, debt and other everyday civil legal problems have been denied help. Basic advice cases paid for by legal aid dropped by 75% after the implementation of the LASPO Act cuts, and are continuing to fall.
Our report found that there has been a 25% decline in solicitors’ firms undertaking civil legal aid cases, and this is leading to a lack of availability of legal aid services for the cases which are still covered by the scheme.
There is a glimmer of hope for a reversal of the shocking decline in access to justice described in our report. The justice secretary, Elizabeth Truss, has committed to a post-implementation review of the LASPO Act reforms to take place sometime this year. LAG argues that the government should use this as an opportunity to put back capacity into the system to assist people with everyday civil legal problems.
- Invest the underspend our has report identified in an innovation and early intervention fund to provide civil legal advice as well as public legal education.
- Set a target for reducing spend on legal aid bureaucracy and reinvesting this in frontline services and contracts: achievable by greater discretion and delegation of powers and decision-making .
- Take immediate action to address the low approval rates for exceptional funding through improving the guidance to decision-makers and reducing bureaucracy.
- In order to counter the low take-up of civil legal aid, the MoJ needs to start a public information campaign about what problems legal aid is available for and how to seek help; this could be linked to wider public legal education initiatives.
- Tackle urgently the emergence of housing legal aid deserts by making arrangements to ensure that there is contracted provision in all procurement areas, and introducing greater flexibility within housing legal aid work to enable providers to undertake preventative work.
In announcing the technology-led modernisation programme for the courts, Elizabeth Truss said that the system should be ‘just, proportionate and accessible’ . LAG argues that this laudable statement of principle needs to be applied to the entire justice system, particularly around access to justice for people with civil legal problems.
* Available at: http://tinyurl.com/za5qdq5