LAG calls for a draft legal aid bill

LAG and the Law Society have today written a joint letter to the Secretary of State for Justice Kenneth Clarke calling on the government to publish its proposals for the reform of legal aid as a draft bill to be scrutinised by a special joint committee of the House of Commons and the House of Lords.

Draft bills provide an opportunity for the public and special interest groups to give evidence on the impact of the proposals in them. In the letter to Kenneth Clarke, LAG and the Law Society point out that the government has received over 5,000 submissions on its proposals for legal aid and that the Justice Committee in its recent report argued that the proposals needed 'substantial further refinement'. LAG has calculated that the proposed cuts of £49m in social welfare law alone will cost the government £286.2m in extra spending on other public services.

The letter goes on to say: 'We also share the Justice Select Committee’s concerns over the definition of domestic violence. It both acts as a perverse incentive to make false claims and prevents women who are victims, but do not wish to pursue a complaint in the courts, from receiving legal aid for assistance with the legal issues surrounding a relationship breakdown.'

LAG and the Law Society are also concerned over the government's proposals on civil litigation. They argue in the letter that the government's plans to change the rules on paying for damages cases are 'unjust' and call for more research on the effects of the proposed changes.

LAG believes that what the government is proposing for legal aid will have a profound impact on the ability of many ordinary people to obtain legal advice and representation. Our recent research shows that 150,000 more people than the government's original estimate of 500,000, will miss out on being able to get help with housing, employment and other common civil legal problems. We believe a draft bill would give an opportunity for a proper consultation to take place on the plans for legal aid, as without this tens of thousands of people will be denied access to justice.

A copy of the full text of the letter is available at: http://www.lag.org.uk/Templates/Internal.asp?NodeID=88856.

Image: Ministry of Justice

Legal aid on the march

Many legal aid lawyers and advice workers joined the TUC march on Saturday to protest at the government plans to cut legal aid and other cuts in publicly funded legal advice services. They were joined by a large contingent of Gurkhas and their families.

The Gurkha Justice Campaign successfully challenged the immigration rules, winning a case in the High Court. It was represented by solicitors Howe and Co, which brought a number of cases on behalf of Gurkhas who had served with the British army using legal aid funds. After a high profile campaign led by actress Joanna Lumley, the government conceded in May 2009 that any Gurkha who had served in the armed forces for four years or more should be allowed to remain in the UK.

The Justice for All and the Law Society's Sound Off for Justice campaigns joined forces on the day and led a march of supporters from the Royal Courts of Justice to join the main march as it made its way through central London to Hyde Park. Young Legal Aid Lawyers with its banner also attended the march. Tooks Chambers and Thompsons solicitors both had their own banners on the march. Sound Off for Justice brought a choir, which was accompanied by two saxophonists. They led marchers in singing protest songs.

Carol Storer, director of the Legal Aid Practitioners Group, was at the demonstration: 'It was a very impressive turn out, with many firms of solicitors represented and a good many Law Centres and other not for profit agencies also attending. People are really concerned about the future of legal aid. Where will our clients go for help if these cuts go ahead?'

Image: LAG. See further pictures here: http://bit.ly/gsSPOY

Civil law to suffer bulk of proposed legal aid cuts

The green paper on legal aid published last week outlines proposals on reductions in fees and in the scope of legal aid in order to make savings of around £350m. The bulk of the cuts, £279m, will fall on civil legal aid.

A telephone advice line is proposed to replace much of the service people currently get from civil legal aid providers. LAG supports the use of telephone services as they can be useful in dealing with many problems and in signposting people to face-to-face advice if they need it. Such services, though, cannot replace legal aid as the results of our recent opinion poll survey indicate that the poorest people are also least likely to use telephone and internet services. These people are therefore the most reliant on local face-to-face legal advice services.

If these proposed cuts are implemented, just under 550,000 less people will receive help with civil legal problems. The civil legal aid system helped just over 1 million people last year and so this cut represents a 50 per cent cut in civil legal aid services to the public. The Ministry of Justice (MoJ) is aiming to implement these cuts from October 2012. LAG understands that the proposed changes to legal aid will be included in legislation and that the first reading of an Act of Parliament to put this in place has been scheduled for spring 2011.

The cuts include taking out of the scope of the legal aid scheme welfare benefits, debt, employment, education and clinical negligence cases. It is proposed that housing law cases are cut back to include only homelessness and disrepair (non-damages). Divorce and private law children cases will be cut from scope saving £178m and the total saving from cutting non-family civil legal aid is around £100m. Around £900 million per year is currently spent on civil legal aid and so this represents just under a third of the budget.

The cuts fall disproportionately on the services which help people with the everyday problems of life such as debt and housing. Sixty-eight per cent of the civil legal help scheme which gives initial help and advice on legal problems is to be cut. Such deep cuts have not been proposed for any other public services.

The bulk of the cuts in non-family civil legal help will fall on the not for profit (NFP) sector. We estimate that out of a total cut of £64m in legal help, over £50m will be cut from local NFP providers such as Citizens Advice Bureaux and Law Centres. These organisations are already experiencing deep cuts from other branches of government. For example, £46m is due to be cut from the Financial Inclusion Fund next March and individual local councils, which fund 50-70 per cent of the costs of running these organisations in total, are also cutting back. For example, Hammersmith and Fulham London Borough Council recently cut £180,000 from its grant to the Law Centre in the borough.

In addition to the cuts in scope, the government intends to introduce a ten per cent reduction in fees in both criminal and civil cases. It has also announced its intention to introduce a competitive process for the allocation of legal aid work. A further consultation paper on introducing this for criminal work will be published next year. According to the green paper, a pilot of a competitive bid round for criminal legal aid work could commence in April 2012 and the government’s intention is to introduce a similar process for civil contracts sometime after 2013.

The MoJ has published a set of impact assessments on the proposals for legal aid. The paper on the impact of the scope changes shows that there would be a reduction in legal help cases of 502,000. The equalities impact assessment acknowledges the difficulties in breaking down the available data into gender, race and disability categories.

A green paper on Lord Justice Jackson’s recommendations on reform of the rules for funding civil litigation was published at the same time as the green paper on legal aid. Success fees and after the event insurance costs would no longer be recoverable from the losers. To compensate claimants, a ten per cent uplift in damages awards is proposed. LAG’s annual lecture next week is to be given by Lord Justice Jackson (see our website for full details).

The green papers are available to downoad at the MoJ website. Responses to the consultations have to be returned to the MoJ by noon on 14 February 2011. LAG is urging everyone with an interest in legal aid and access to justice to submit a response to the consultations.

Legal aid green paper 'imminent' says minister

Clever poker players look for 'tells' in their opponents’ body language to discern what hand they have got. Members of a packed fringe meeting at the Conservative party conference on Tuesday, addressed by legal aid minister Jonathan Djanogly, were all looking for the 'tells' about his plans for the legal aid system. The minister, though, was keeping his cards close to his chest, but he did reiterate some familiar themes, which might give some indication of government thinking. He also told the meeting, which had been organised by the think tank Policy Exchange, that a green paper on legal aid was 'imminent'.

The nub of Djanogly's speech was that spending on legal aid has doubled in real terms in the past 20 years and as his department has to find significant cuts, legal aid will be a target. The minister said that there would be a green paper on legal aid in the next few weeks and reiterated the point he has now made on a number of occasions that the government wants to look at the legal aid system in its totality rather than going down the road of a 'salami-slicing review'. The starting point, he argued, was 'what we need to do to reform the system so that vulnerable people have access to justice'. Ominously, for the legal aid lawyers in the audience, Djanogly talked about what he sees as anomalies in the system such as the higher fees paid for murder trials and that fraud trial fees are paid on the 'value of the case rather than its complexity'.

Some points Djanogly made could have been lifted directly from the previous government’s pronouncements on legal aid. He trotted out comparisons with other countries' spending on legal aid, £3 per head of population in France and £5 in Germany as against £38 in England and Wales. As politicians are prone to do, he was selective in his facts. He did not mention the Ministry of Justice's own research published last year which found that while spending in England and Wales is the highest in Europe, once the total costs of the criminal and civil justice systems are taken into account in the continental inquisitorial systems the figures on spending are similar to the UK.

Another significant point he made, which could have been lifted from a speech given by one of his Labour predecessors in government, was that 'too many cases go to trial in the Crown Court'. When pressed on this point by a member of the audience who argued about the importance of being able to elect to go to a jury trial, Djanogly replied that he was 'thinking hard about the issue as 80 per cent of thief trials in the Crown Court are for less than £200'. He argued that 'other levers such as how legal aid is handed out' can be used to persuade those accused of a crime to elect for trial in an appropriate court.


LAG hopes, perhaps optimistically, that the green paper will acknowledge that much of the cost drivers for legal aid which have led to the increase in expenditure which Djanogly referred to in his speech are outside the control of the legal aid system. Also, expenditure on legal aid has remained static over the past four years. This has been due mainly to the reintroduction of the means test for criminal legal aid and cuts in fees introduced by the last government. While Djanogly could give no indication of the amount which will have to be cut from legal aid, he said that the Ministry of Justice had to find 25 per cent in savings and as the ministry’s total budget is £9.5 billion, of which legal aid makes up £2.2 billion, 'you get some idea of the level' of cuts needed.

In a few weeks we will no longer be looking for clues or 'tells' about the government’s intentions. The comprehensive spending review announcement on 20 October will tell us how much the government intends to spend on legal aid and the green paper will indicate what sort of system it envisages for the future.

Image: Legal Action Group