Legal aid & the provision of legal services to the public need to be restored & expanded, says Geoffrey Bindman
In the recent Supreme Court decision declaring the illegality of fees for employment tribunal claimants, Lord Reed articulated with matchless clarity the case for unimpeded access to the courts. Without it, ‘laws are liable to become a dead letter, the work done by parliament may be rendered nugatory, and the democratic election of members of parliament may become a meaningless charade’. All credit to the Supreme Court for their principled and effective intervention.
But the imposition of fees as a condition of access is sadly only one among several recent curbs on access to justice. The inaccessibility of necessary legal advice and representation can have even more drastic consequences than those described by Lord Reed. We know, for example, that residents at Grenfell Tower were long worried about fire risks. Access to legal advice might well have exposed regulatory breaches in time and prevented the tragic fire and loss of
