The government is to ditch its controversial plan to limit the amount of initial advice legal aid lawyers can give asylum-seekers to five hours, but will axe legal aid altogether for completing asylum applications, it was reported this week.
Press reports said the government had accepted practitioners' arguments that the five-hour limit (three hours in immigration cases) - proposed in June - would drive firms out of the field.
It looks set to be replaced by an as-yet-unspecified financial threshold.
It was also claimed that immigration and asylum lawyers would lose the power to self-certify, and that applications would have to be submitted in advance for legal aid to help with appeals.
The government was said to consider that reforms would improve the quality of initial Home Office interviews and decisions sufficiently to do away with legal aid for completing asylum applications.
An announcement is likely this week.
The Department for Constitutional Affairs would not comment.
Law Society chief executive Janet Paraskeva welcomed the move to drop the limit on hours, but added: 'It is vital that any thresholds are realistic, that they can be exceeded when an individual case needs more work, and that the system does not impose unnecessary bureaucratic burdens on firms.'
However, she expressed concern at plans to restrict the availability of legal aid.
'We doubt the asylum system can be developed so that legal advice is not required,' she said.
Meanwhile, Titus Miranda, a 57-year-old solicitor from Harrow in north London, was sentenced to five years' imprisonment by Middlesex Crown Court last week after being found guilty of conspiracy to defraud by obtaining permission for a large number of asylum seekers to remain in the UK.
The Office for the Supervision of Solicitors intervened in his firm in March 2002.
The court heard that Miranda had links with gangs which arrange passage out of China and he processed hundreds of similar asylum applications.
(See [2003] Gazette, 27 November, 12)
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