The lord chancellor is failing in his statutory duty on legal aid, MPs have concluded in a damning report that paints the bleakest picture to date of the sector which also warns of an ‘unacceptably high risk’ of miscarriages of justice.
The House of Commons justice select committee, chaired by Labour’s Andy Slaughter, today said legal aid is vital to ensuring that people with limited means can enforce their rights. However, following an extensive investigation, the committee found the criminal duty solicitor scheme in a ‘dire state’, the wider criminal legal aid sector ‘financially unsustainable’, frozen eligibility thresholds within civil legal aid have created a ‘justice gap’ and the civil legal aid provider base is under ‘severe strain’.
In criminal legal aid, the committee found that the means test has not been updated since 2009. Consequentially, someone on the minimum wage would earn too much to qualify for legal aid in the magistrates’ court. Targeted increases to police station fees are unlikely to be enough to future-proof the duty solicitor scheme.
The committee said the financial position of criminal legal aid providers has deteriorated and the Bellamy review’s £135m recommendation as a first step to nurse the sector back to health is now ‘outdated’.
In civil legal aid, the committee found rates to be ‘fundamentally uneconomical’ for providers. Recent fee uplifts for housing and immigration work ‘are too little, too late’ to prevent further decline.
The committee found substantial evidence that the lord chancellor is failing in his statutory duty to 'secure that legal aid is made available... evidenced by the poor level of service provision across all categories of law’.
The Legal Aid Agency's organisation set-up was branded ‘deficient’ and providers not sufficiently compensated for the extra work caused by a cyber-attack on the agency's systems.
The committee's 58 recommendations include raising eligibility and means test thresholds, identifying areas suffering from a critical shortage of providers for targeted action, fee uplifts and an independent pay review process, and reforming the LAA’s objectives.
Law Society president Mark Evans said the report lays bare the consequences of underinvestment. The response of the government under the leadership of Andy Burnham, who will become prime minister next week, ‘will be a key test of its commitment to ensuring the legal system works for everyone’.
Julie Bishop, director of the Law Centres Network, said: 'A cross-party committee of MPs has now confirmed what law centres see every day - millions of people are trapped in a justice gap, unable to get legal aid and unable to pay for legal help... When a single person must survive on £9 a day after housing costs to qualify for legal aid, and survivors of domestic abuse face their abusers in court alone because they work in low-paid work, this is not a system under strain. It is a system that has broken.'
CILEX president Sara Fowler urged the government to remove barriers for suitably qualified CILEX lawyers to join the police station duty scheme.
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