As legal aid limps past 60, Elsa Booth suggests the adoption of some alternative funding pathways
Legal aid has always been a hotbed of debate but ever since Lord Carter’s controversial review in 2006, with its trumpeting call for market drive, tendering and fixed fees, the system has been in a perpetual state of reform (see Legal Aid: A Market-based Approach to Reform).
Perhaps inevitably, the dust clouds of controversy surrounding those reforms have obscured many of legal aid’s remarkable achievements.
However, on this 60th anniversary of legal aid—while there is much to celebrate about its existence and endurance—many practitioners take the view that as a mechanism to deliver access to justice, it is simply too narrow. This view is backed up by statistics which show that a decade ago, 52% of the population was financially eligible for legally aided civil representation, a figure which has now dwindled to under a third (see The Justice Gap: Whatever Happened to Legal Aid?).
Yet among all the understandable fire and brimstone about this
