Debate on legal aid reforms “long overdue”
Date: 13 July 2007
Issue: Vol 157, Issue 7281
Categories: News, Legal aid
Lawyers have welcomed the decision to hold a House of Commons debate on the government’s much criticised proposals for legal aid reform, following a damning report from the Constitutional Affairs Committee, which described the reforms as a “breathtaking risk”.
Alistair MacDonald, co-chair of the Association of Lawyers for Children, believes a debate on changes that have the potential to “decimate legal representation for the country’s most vulnerable children and to scupper a number of government-sponsored initiatives” in the family law field is long overdue.
The number of firms with family law legal aid contracts has fallen from 4,593 to 2,784 since 2001, and MacDonald claims that government proposals for legal aid reform, which include the introduction of competitive tendering, will result in a further and dramatic erosion in the number of solicitors and barristers able to act in family proceedings.
MacDonald adds: “The provision of high quality advice and representation for children and parents by specialist practitioners is essential if the welfare, safety and rights of those children are to be effectively safeguarded in court. The government’s legal aid reforms appear fundamentally to undermine this widely accepted proposition and display a cavalier disregard for the most vulnerable children in this country.”
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