Legal aid solicitors still await government review
As the Legal Aid Sentencing and Punishment of Offenders Act 2012 (LASPO) hits its three-year anniversary, legal aid solicitors are still waiting for a review.
LASPO took effect in April 2013, removing legal aid from vast tranches of civil and private family law, including housing (except where an imminent threat of homelessness exists) and social security law.
Writing in NLJ this week, columnist Jon Robins notes the latest figures from the Legal Aid Agency showing the workload for advice and assistance about a legal problem is now one third of pre-LASPO levels and civil representation is about two-thirds of what it was. Despite Ministry of Justice (MoJ) promises, however, there has been no government review of LASPO.
Robins points out that only 226 applications were granted out of 1,172 made to the exceptional funding regime, which was supposed to be a safety net against the LASPO cuts. The MoJ had anticipated that between 5,000 and 7,000 applications would be made each year.
“It’s no surprise as the cuts bite, law firms pull out of what remains of the legal aid scheme, not-for-profit advice agencies go to the wall, and then there is the maddening bureaucracy of legal aid,” Robins writes.
Steve Hynes, director of the Legal Action Group, says: “The LASPO Act has denied tens of thousands of people access to justice and equality before the law. It should not be reviewed, but repealed.
“The MoJ seems to believe that justice is a public service to be rationed, rather than a set of principles to be adhered to.”
An MoJ spokesman said: “As we have already made clear, we are committed to having a review of the legal aid reforms in LASPO. Our legal aid system is still one of the most generous in the world and last year we spent £1.6bn on legal aid. We have made sure legal aid continues to be available in the highest priority cases, for example where people’s life or liberty is at stake, where they face the loss of their home, in domestic violence cases or where their children may be taken into care.”
