Rolling back justice (3)

Earlier this year, a series of ordinary people gave testimony before a distinguished panel of non-lawyers in the Commons Committee Room 10 as part of the Commission of Inquiry into the case for legal aid. The idea behind the event, organised by the Haldane Society of Socialist Lawyers and the Young Legal Aid Lawyers, was to examine what kind of safety net our system of publicly-funded law provides for ordinary people.

One particularly memorable, but uncomfortable, testimony came from a young mother of two known as EP. She had successfully managed to extricate herself from an abusive relationship but it had taken years. EP told them how the child protection agencies intervened as a result of the couple’s spiraling addiction problems. “I was so miserable. I was just giving up on life. I did not have the energy or the will to try and sort myself out...Over the next year things were awful,” she related to the panel comprising the former Lib