Knock-on expenses will undermine government targets
Cutting legal aid will cost the public purse at least an extra £139m in unbudgeted knock-on expenses, an independent report by King’s College London has found.
The proposed cuts to civil legal aid in the areas of family law, clinical negligence and social welfare law aim to save the government £240m.However, a report published this week, Unintended Consequences: the cost of the Government’s Legal Aid Reforms, shows those cuts will shift the burden onto other taxpayer-funded bodies, such as the NHS, leading to unbudgeted costs of £139m.
This would wipe out nearly 60% of all predicted savings. The report notes that numerous costs could not be estimated and so this figure “is likely to be a substantial underestimate of the true costs”.
Dr Graham Cookson, who was commissioned by the Law Society to produce the report, found that removing legal aid for clinical negligence victims would cost the NHS nearly three times more than it saved the Ministry of Justice (MoJ)—£28.5m each year against projected budget savings of £10.5m.
The removal of legal aid from private family law would create knock-on costs of £100m each year against projected savings of £170m, while scrapping legal aid for social welfare law would have knock-on costs of £35.2m against savings of £58m.
Peter Walsh, chief executive of Action Against Medical Accidents, says: “The government has failed to prove two of the key assumptions supporting its proposals, these being that the new regime will result in significant savings or that the potential savings alone justify the proposed changes.”
Emma Scott, director of the campaigning organisation Rights of Women, says legal aid is “key” to enabling women to protect themselves and their children from violence and abusive relationships.
Desmond Hudson, CEO of the Law Society, accused the MoJ of “kamikaze accounting” that “will do little to tackle the deficit while sacrificing access to justice”.
However, an MoJ spokesperson claimed that the government had been clear that the costs and benefits detailed in the impact assessment were the best estimate of the potential effects of the reforms.
“Considered alongside our wider reforms the department of health has confirmed that costs to the NHS are expected to reduce,” they said.
The Legal Aid, Sentencing and Punishment of Offenders Bill is currently before the House of Lords.
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