LASPO has failed, the Bar Council has declared in a withering assessment of the controversial legislation five years on.
The Bar Council submitted evidence this week to the Ministry of Justice (MoJ) ahead of the MoJ’s review of LASPO (the Legal Aid, Sentencing and Punishment of Offenders Act 2012). LASPO, which came into force in April 2013, slashed legal aid across most areas of civil and family law. The Bar Council has also published the results of a survey of its members into LASPO’s impact.
In its response, the Bar Council delivers a dire warning that the Act has impeded public access to justice, jeopardised the operation of the justice system and damaged the future of the publicly funded legal professions.
In its survey, more than 91% of respondents reported a significant increase in the number of individuals struggling to get legal advice and representation. The same number of barristers reported a significant increase in the number of litigants in person (LiPs) in family cases, while 77% reported a significant increase in LiPs in civil cases.
The cuts have had a knock-on effect further down the line—77% reported a significant delay in family court cases due to the increase in LiPs, while nearly half the barristers (48%) do less legal aid work than before LASPO and, worryingly, nearly 25% have stopped doing legal aid work altogether.
Andrew Walker QC, Chair of the Bar, said: ‘LASPO has not just failed: it has caused untold damage to our justice system and to access to justice.
‘The Ministry and the government cannot and must not hide from this. The review itself cannot and must not gloss over what barristers and other legal professionals, the judiciary and the public are seeing happening in our courts.
‘The fact there are significant delays in the family and civil courts is a red flag. For those at the front-line, the results are clear: the true costs of LASPO, and the harm it has caused, are far greater than the government has admitted. We need a significant change of direction to rectify five years of failure.’
The Bar Council expressed grave concerns that the MoJ may not have gathered the necessary evidence about LASPO’s impact on all aspects of the justice system or consequential costs caused to other government departments.
It called on the government to reverse the ‘innocence tax’ where those acquitted of criminal offences are unable to recover the reasonable costs of a privately funded defence; reintroduce legal aid in a range of family law proceedings, including private law children proceedings; and reintroduce a legal help scheme for welfare benefit cases.
And it urged the government to relax the criteria for exceptional case funding in coroner’s inquests where the death occurred in the care of the state and the state has agreed to provide separate representation for one or more interested persons; and to raise the eligibility threshold for legal aid.
