The Department for Constitutional Affairs (DCA) has been promised more cash in Chancellor Gordon Brown’s spending review, but legal aid solicitors are predicting hard times ahead after the department agreed to return the favour by slashing £50 million a year off the legal aid budget.

The DCA will receive a cash injection of £440 million over the next three years, signifying annual budgetary increases at the rate of inflation plus 1.5%, but it was told by Mr Brown that in return it must make efficiency savings of some £290 million. The DCA – which employs more than 20,000 workers – will see 1,100 jobs go as a result, including 800 from the court service. Some 300 workers at DCA headquarters will also face the chop.


A DCA spokeswoman told the Gazette it thought the overall increases were ‘not bad’, but she admitted: ‘We will have to make savings of about £100 million a year, and half of that will come from legal aid.’ She said most of the cost cutting would result from measures that had already been announced.



Other organisations affected include the Home Office, which will get more than £2 billion extra by 2007/2008 out of a total package of £3.5 billion for crime, justice and community initiatives.


The Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) got an average annual increase of 3% as part of the additional £108 million awarded to the Law Officers’ Departments. A CPS spokesman said it was pleased with the outcome, given that times were tough. ‘[This] means that the CPS can roll out the charging programme by March 2007 – this is a good result for the CPS and for the wider criminal justice system too,’ he said.


But prosecutors’ union the First Division Association expressed surprise at the new deadline. ‘As far as we were concerned, it was supposed to have been rolled out this year,’ said CPS convenor Kris Venkatasami. ‘But we give a cautious welcome as the CPS does appear to have secured some new funding.’


Criminal Law Solicitors Association director Rodney Warren warned that more money for the police and prosecution would result in more arrests, at the risk of seeing people going unrepresented. ‘It is disappointing that the government still hasn’t learned that if it spends money in one place, it must also spend money in another,’ he said.


Law Society chief executive Janet Paraskeva agreed, and argued that the allocation could see disadvantaged people go without civil legal aid. ‘There is no evidence of how [the government] plans to fund increased demand on criminal legal aid,’ she said. ‘Poorly anticipated demand has already led to devastating inroads in the civil legal aid budget.’


Legal Aid Practitioners Group director Richard Miller expressed concern about the impact of court staff shortages. He added: ‘[The review’s] adequacy will depend on ensuring that other government departments are not allowed to carry on spending the legal aid fund.’