Urgent need for early legal advice

A leading legal access campaigner has called for the ‘urgent’ reinstatement of early advice legal aid, after the Ministry of Justice (MoJ) published devastating figures.

Legal help—the system of legal aid for early advice—was restricted in April 2013 by LASPO (the Legal Aid Sentencing and Punishment of Offenders Act 2012). The latest Legal Aid Statistics quarterly figures, published by the MoJ shortly before Christmas, reveal spending on legal help is less than one-third of pre-LASPO levels, and confirm a continuing decline in legal help cases with a 4% drop compared to the same period in 2016.

Writing in this week’s NLJ (see Frozen out? Civil legal aid), Legal Action Group director Steve Hynes says: ‘We are warning that action needs to taken urgently, as civil legal aid is becoming a narrow collection of specialisms dominated by child protection, with shrinking provision for the type of early advice services needed by the general public.’

Hynes points out that the MoJ figures show that legal help makes up more than 80% of the parts of housing law work that remain eligible for legal aid, but the number of cases has been declining. Similar declines are reported for those areas of immigration and mental health law that remain within the scope of legal aid.

A mere 440 welfare benefits cases were brought in the past year, compared to 83,000 in 2012/13 before LASPO came into force. Legal help cases across the board have fallen from 575,000 before LASPO to just 145,000 in the past year.

Legal help in family cases is down 12% on the previous quarter in 2016, and the number of family mediation meetings—which were heavily promoted by the MoJ—are down by 5%.

Hynes says this is feeding problems further down the line: ‘LAG, along with many campaigners, argues that the lack of availability of early advice in family cases is causing the reduction in take-up of mediation and feeding the rise of the numbers of litigants in person before the family courts.’

And while exceptional case funding was originally estimated to be awarded to 10,000 cases per year, only 570 new claims were reported in the last quarter.

A spokesman for the MoJ, which announced in October 2017 that it would hold a review of LASPO, said: 'Legal aid for early legal advice continues to be available in a wide range of cases. Last year we spent £1.6bn on legal aid, more than a fifth of the department’s budget.

'We are assessing the legal aid changes brought in under LASPO through our post-implementation review of the legislation, which will report by summer recess 2018.'