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25 June 2021 / Dr Jon Robins
Issue: 7938 / Categories: Opinion , Legal aid focus , Profession , Human rights
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Justice in a time of austerity…revisited

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Those people who bear the brunt of the pandemic also suffer disproportionately from a broken justice system, as Jon Robins reports

Over 12 months between ending late 2019 I travelled the country interviewing people about their experiences of the justice system in a project undertaken together with Dr Dan Newman.

Dan, a senior law lecturer at Cardiff University, mapped the local legal advice sector and I did the ‘on location’ interviews. The book (Justice in a time of austerity: Stories from a system in crisis) is published this week.

Our journey began on a Monday morning at Stratford Hearing Centre in east London where we shadowed housing duty adviser, Simon Mullings—as I reported in NLJ (‘Justice in a time of austerity’). There were 12 rent possession cases on a housing list but, on a busy day, it stretched to 20 people—typically, each person has less than five minutes before the court.

Tenants didn’t know what to expect and they certainly didn’t expect

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MOVERS & SHAKERS

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