Irvine: low pay is problem

Legal Aid: Lord Chancellor admits to frustration at the cost of asylum and crime policies

The Lord Chancellor last week publicly admitted that legal aid has stumbled into problems owing to low rates of pay, and hinted at his frustration over having to foot the bill for government asylum and crime policies through his budget.

Giving evidence to the new House of Commons select committee scrutinising the Lord Chancellor's Department (LCD), Lord Irvine explained that he had been forced to ask the Treasury for an extra 412 million, mainly to cover the increased cost of crime and immigration advice following Home Office initiatives.

He said legal aid 'had not been sufficiently funded for the way things have turned out'.

Lord Irvine said he was 'not personally embarrassed' about overspending by 14% in one year.

'It is absolutely critical that when changes to substantive law are made - particularly in criminal law - that the downstream consequences should be looked at and that those downstream consequences should be properly funded,' he argued.

LCD permanent secretary Sir Haydn Phillips said the department was only red faced at having to remind ministers to explain the consequential costs of their policies to Parliament.

'Most of those [costs] are resultant of decisions made by other departments,' he said.

Lord Irvine insisted that there is no current crisis in legal aid, but added: 'It is true that there has been a weakening of the supplier base which is, no doubt, attributable to the fees we can afford to pay.'

He said the issue had not been raised in Parliament, but had been discussed with the Treasury.

'I'm sure the Treasury does listen to our arguments and that it does accept the validity of those arguments,' he said.

'But at the end of the day that must be translated into pounds, shillings and pence.'

Rodney Warren, chairman of the Law Society's access to justice committee and director of the Criminal Law Solicitors Association, said the problems legal aid was facing were caused by inadequate forward planning.

'It is interesting that Lord Irvine refers to pounds, shillings and pence because it was around the time of decimalisation that we were last given a decent increase in remuneration - some 30 years ago,' he said.

'It is refreshing that he has focused on what practitioners have been warning him about for years and come to the conclusion that a policy of starvation of funding has resulted in a skeleton.'

Legal Aid Practitioners Group director Richard Miller said the government was in the process of introducing measures that would continue to increase the need for legal advice.

'Lord Irvine is absolutely right to say that when another government department creates such a need, they should meet the costs of dealing with it,' he said.

'If this does not happen, growing numbers of clients will be unable to get the help they require.'

Lord Irvine also announced that he would 'very shortly' be launching a consultation on the QC system, the possibility of a judicial appointments commission and whether the current manner of court dress should remain.

But he insisted there was no conflict between his roles as head of the judiciary and cabinet minister, and warned the committee against changing the system just for the sake of 'academic reasons or to conform to some international paradigm'.

He argued: '[Our system] is in the best state that is reasonably achievable.'

Paula Rohan