Lack of trust at heart of legal aid failures

It’s a measure of the madness that lies at the heart of legal aid policy that among the many sensible recommendations made in the House of Commons’ Justice Committee report published last week, MPs felt the need to add that the Legal Aid Agency (LAA) ‘should be empowered to place more trust in providers’.

All too often the legal aid’s administrative body is a barrier to justice rather than its enabler. It was a theme of our own research in Justice in a Time of Austerity, published in June (Bristol University Press). In the course of a year of interviews, the LAA was variously described as exhibiting a ‘culture of refusal’, being ‘hostile’, ‘punitive’ and ‘having lost all pragmatism’ in its dealings with practitioners. Few tears were shed when the Legal Services Commission was axed under the Legal Aid, Sentencing and Punishment of Offenders Act 2012 (LASPO) in 2013;