The incredible shrinking legal aid statistics
Worrying signs that clients could already be finding it harder to access legal advice, even before next year’s legal aid cuts come in to force, emerge from the latest annual statistics from the Legal Services Commission.
The LSC’s annual report, published last week, reveals that the total number of acts of assistance it funded over the past year fell by 7.5%, from 2.7 million in 2010-11 to just under 2.5 million.
Given the economic climate that seems odd. One might expect that a downturn in the economy would mean more people are in need of legal advice and, with high unemployment figures, that more people are eligible for legal aid. Breaking down those figures, annual statistical data released at the same time, shows that the number of civil contracts held by solicitors’ firms fell from 2,039 in 2010-11 to 1,711 last year and the number of criminal contracts fell from 1,733 to 1,640.
Consequently the number of solicitors’ offices where clients could go for help decreased. There are 406 fewer civil and 109 fewer criminal offices this year than there were last year.
With the number of solicitors’ offices declining, it might be expected that clients with potential problems would make greater use of telephone services to get help.
But the data shows that the number of people using the telephone to seek publicly funded legal advice dropped by 22% in 2011/12, down from 124,819 cases to 97,872. And use of the telephone triage service fell by 24%, from 264,339 calls last year to 200,737 this year.
This shows that people are not opting to use the telephone where they cannot physically access legal services, perhaps due to language or other communication difficulties, lack of a telephone or other vulnerabilities. This drop comes as the government is figuring out how to implement plans for a mandatory telephone gateway, which people will have to call before getting advice on any civil or family problem.
The government hails the ‘telephone gateway’ as a way of making advice more accessible, but the evidence suggests that the telephone is not the way people seek help, and therefore the new regime will do nothing to assist access to justice.
Where people have increasingly gone to seek help are Community Legal Advice Centres (CLACs), organisations set up to provide one-stop shop advice on clusters of problems. They saw a 51% upturn in the number of family cases dealt with last year, rising from 1,380 to 2,088 and a 37% increase in the number of non-family cases, up from 17,135 in 2010/11 to 23,500 in 2011/12.
In April the LSC announced it will be ending the nine remaining CLAC contracts next year. Perhaps it needs to rethink.
Catherine Baksi is a reporter on the Gazette
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Comments
The legal aid system is simply collapsing
Yet further evidence that, step-by-step, the entire legal aid system is simply collapsing. It's a slow and painful death to watch – death by 1000 cuts. There are fewer and fewer firms offering a declining range of services using public funding. I firmly suspect that a significant number of law firms currently holding civil or criminal contract, are only surviving because of very low interest rates. These are frankly dead firms walking – zombie firms. When they merger will go bust or give up their public funding contracts, there are going to be very few firms replacing them.
No firm conclusions
I am not sure that many firm conclusions can be drawn from the crime data. What would be interesting to know is how many contracts have been taken over by other providers (novation). Anecdotally this is the true pattern that has emerged over the last couple of years, much later than Lord Carter envisaged, but nonetheless now a feature of the landscape as firms act to cut overheads (hence the loss of offices) and merge into bigger entities.
How it all starts...
Britain 2012 . Brown sugary water and meat in a bun underpins a global sporting event . Meanwhile.....the future....mass access to justice is cut. Faith by the majority of the population in a healthy civil society and the rule of law becomes ever-more qualified, cynical and apathetic....the resolution of private feuds by criminal means, taxes law enforcement agencies. Various elites are shown as acting in contempt of the rule of law to enrich themselves and grow ever fatter on the proliferation of business opportunities afforded them ...some demagogues promising varieties of "New Dawns" (primarily based on hatred of immigrants and outsiders) gain support.
Some further outrageous incident infers decadence and moral bankruptcy at the top and the tipping point is reached ...calls to "action" are made and the celebrity culture provides fertile ground for the mass acceptance of a man or woman of "action" whose prescriptions for "National Recovery" entail grossly unconstitutional behaviour, violence and eventually...mass murder.
Barbarism 1 The Rule of Law: Nil.
Obviously I`m not suggesting the above will happen-people are usually better-fed these days for a start. But when you start monkeying with certain tenets of civilisation, there are knock-on effects...
Decline of Legal Aid
Year - Number of Criminal Legal Aid Franchisees
1997 - 6,500
2001 - 3,300
2010 - 1,733
2011 - 1,640
In my view once ABS really takes off and the Duty Solicitor Slots are removed from the individual solicitor and placed with the law firm this will fall to a couple of hundred suppliers, possibly even less than that.
farm tenants
It is outrageous that in this day and age, people face the Dickensian threat of eviction, usually through no fault of their own.
No one should ever be evicted. The lenders must be forced by law to ensure families are not thrown out onto the street and end up in B&B accomodation or on some sink estate when a few more months grace to find an alternative home or maybe find employment that would enable them to pay the mortgage.
But that is capitalism for you - bankers' bonuses come before family needs.
The sooner ALL banks are state owned and run, the better.