Law centres warn on legal aid cuts
Law centres will close, leaving ‘many thousands’ of the poor and marginalised without access to justice if the government’s legal aid cuts are implemented, peers have warned.
In a short debate this week, Labour’s former legal aid minister Lord Bach asked what assessment the government had made of the implications for law centres of legal aid cuts. Bach said that taking social welfare law out of the scope of legal aid would reduce by 86% the funding that law centres receive to provide advice or ‘legal help’.
This, he said, will ‘inevitably’ cause law centres to close and leave ‘many thousands of people, often the poor and marginalised’ without access to justice, which would end up costing taxpayers more due to unresolved escalating problems. Such an ‘absurd’ and ‘wrong’ move, would make the country ‘less just and less civilised’.
Justice minister Lord McNally rejected the ‘worst-case scenario’ presented by Bach. He said the government’s equality impact assessment indicated the likely costs and benefits of the reforms.
Responding to a question from Conservative peer Lord Mackay of Clashfern, McNally agreed that law centres were the most efficient and economical way of providing advice for those who are less well off.
He accepted that the reforms will have an impact on the not-for-profit sector, and said that in recognition of that the government had provided £107m in transitional funds and an additional £20m to help the sector restructure.
Commenting afterwards, the director of the Law Centres Federation, Julie Bishop, said the government seemed to regard the disproportionate impact of the cuts on the disadvantaged as ‘acceptable collateral damage’.
She said: ‘Law centres are disappointed that Lord McNally, yet again, did not address the question but simply referred critics to the Ministry of Justice impact assessments,’ which show that vulnerable groups will be disproportionately disadvantaged by the cuts.’
Bishop said the demand for social welfare law advice has been rising during the economic crisis, while the supply has been eroded. ‘Considering the UK’s current economic performance and predictions of its further deterioration, this is not the time to abandon people losing their jobs and homes through no fault of their own. Lord McNally must not pretend that this is not happening,’ she said.
Comments
The fruit of Tantalus
The distasteful inference behind all these cuts-oh, sorry, "restructuring", is that law is a luxury to be enjoyed by the poor in the good times. Times get hard, law retreats like the mythical fruit clawed at by Tantalus in vain....there are plenty of sound moral arguments for the rule of law to persist or even strengthen in straitened times, but those arguments run up against fundamental reactionary ideologies typical of a ruling elite isolated from the grim realities of lives blighted by the Recession.
PS if it wasn`t Tantalus, someone will probably know who.... Sisyphus ?
Legal Aid Cuts
It is a shame that the less well off and more vulnerable will be cut off. Like some of the other governent cuts I do think there are other more imaginative and targeted ways of saving money by cutting down on abuse of the system and reducing the incredible waste which goes on.
As far as legal aid and fee exemption are concerned I feel that savings could be made by a more targeted approach or controlled through active case management. Concerning fee exemption, I do not know what cuts have been proposed here. However, I am personally aware of 3 individuals who have brought around 65 vexatious claims between them to the High Court because the system indulged these fools and allowed them to spend most of their time in court 24 x 7 rather than where they should have been - in the job centre looking for work. Most of these cases have run their cause (some taking years) and been judged to be wholly without merit and vexatious. I estimate that the costs of making these claims and the court time (not to mention the costs to the defendants on the receiving end of this abuse) runs into millions. That is just 3 individual wasters who have cost millions of pounds of taxpayers money.
If there had been a mechanism in place to look at potential serial litigators early on or the useless cases had been weeded out and decisively dealt with by a judge at an early stage, millions of pounds of taxpayers funds could have been saved. The problem was that many of the cases were bounced between the lower and appeal court for years, each judge not apparently ever properly getting to grips with the cases until they finally became tired of the persistence of these people and the incessant appeals made.
Incidentally in one of the cases the claimant towards the latter stage of his hopeless litigation also managed to get the Pro Bono Unit to represent him. It beggars belief that we allow this sort of thing to go on. Of course people should have access to justice but not when they are allowed to cause mayhem to the lives of many and systematically abuse the generosity of our system.