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Legal aid: spotlight on a crisis

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03 December 2020 / Rohini Teather
Issue: 7913 / Categories: Opinion , Legal aid focus , Profession , Covid-19
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Without data on the damage done to legal aid, how can the government help this fractured system recover? Rohini Teather, Head of Parliamentary Affairs at LAPG, reports

If we have learned anything over the past nine months, it’s that coronavirus (COVID-19) is not an equal opportunities virus. The health and the economic consequences of the pandemic have hit the poorest and most vulnerable in our society the hardest—and had a similarly devastating effect on the social justice lawyers who serve them. Lawyers working in criminal and civil legal aid have not had a fee increase since the 1990s, which means their fees have decreased by 34% in real terms. With the sector already fragile after so many years of under-investment, it has struggled to absorb the financial impact of this year.

The pandemic has just made a bad situation worse. Those of us working in legal aid policy have been conscious of an absence of concrete data since the Legal Aid, Sentencing and Punishment of Offenders Act 2012 (LASPO

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