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11 August 2017 / Steve Hynes
Issue: 7758 / Categories: Opinion , Legal aid focus , Legal services , Profession
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Justice denied revisited (Pt 2)

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Can Bob fix it? Steve Hynes hopes the chairman of the Justice Select Committee can halt the catastrophic decline in civil legal aid

Bob Neill MP, chairman of the Justice Select Committee in the Commons made some pertinent comments before the recess on the priorities for his committee. The view of the Conservative MP on legal aid is that, while he understands the budget pressures the government is under, he believes ‘we have now removed more than the system can take and should rectify the anomalies as soon as possible,’ (www.thetimes.co.uk).

He pointed to the case of Charlie Gard, in which his parents had to rely on lawyers working pro bono to represent them as they did not qualify for legal aid, but the scale of the failures of the civil legal aid are much greater than this one high profile tragic case.

The latest statistics from the Ministry of Justice (MoJ) on the take-up of civil legal aid paint a grim picture of continuing decline. Public law children cases

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