LAG director calls for separate civil legal aid fund

Steve Hynes, director of the Legal Action Group, has called for a separate civil legal aid fund to be set up.

While the scope and purpose of criminal legal aid policy remains clear—to provide defence services to anyone accused of a crime, subject to a means test—there is no such consensus in civil legal aid, Hynes writes in this week’s NLJ.

Hynes says the Legal Aid, Sentencing and Punishment of Offenders Act 2012 (LASPO) has “created a rump civil legal aid system to provide the minimum safety net the government could get away with without being caught by the Human Rights Act 1998. It has resulted in the courts, particularly in family cases, becoming clogged-up with litigants in person and the choking off of early advice to deal with people’s civil legal problems before they spiral out of control”.