The reduction in accessibility of legal aid has a chilling effect on access to justice
Slide 1: The state of legal aid
Access to legal aid has been majorly disturbed in recent years. The 2012 Legal Aid, Sentencing and Punishment of Offenders Act was the major catalyst that changed the legal aid regime and defines it still. LASPO has narrowed the criteria for cases that could qualify for legal aid. Many areas of law, like some family law issues, housing disputes, and welfare benefits challenges, were excluded from legal aid coverage.
Furthermore, cuts were made to the wages lawyers could receive for taking up legal aid cases. The Ministry of Justice implemented a 10% cut in fees paid to solicitors for civil legal aid cases between October 2011 and February 2012. Criminal legal aid cases also suffered an 8,75% cut during 2016.
Moreover - legal aid fees have not had any raises since they were frozen in 1996. This essentially means that their value is a mere fraction of what it was then due to inflation. The National Audit Office, in real terms (accounting for inflation), civil legal aid fees are now approximately half of what they were in 1996.
Slide 2: Consequences
The bottom line is that lawyers and solicitors have little incentive to take up legal aid cases due to their unprofitability (especially compared to traditional market cases). The only tangible reasons to take up legal aid cases would be either charity or potential large settlements. This essentially results in few smaller firms and young legal experts delving into legal aid at all due to its low-profit margins and high risks. What legal aid cases are taken are usually complex cases taken up by large firms. This further shrinks the legal access to the most vulnerable in society, as many of their cases concern matters that do not meet the criteria of having potential large settlements.
The goal of LASPO may have been to divert people away from contentious litigation towards other out-of-court solutions, mediation or other alternatives. The harsh truth is however that such justice is hard to achieve due to both a lack of education on the methods to do so and power imbalance between victims of marginalised groups in society and other actors. The financial inability of the latter to afford good lawyers or negotiators makes them vulnerable in out-of-court settlements and disadvantaged in in-court ones without legal aid. Thus in the end justice is denied to them. The right to a fair trial is interwoven in the right to a fair and public hearing, which is connected to right to legal assistance which cannot exist for impoverished individuals without legal aid.
Slide 3: The tangible impacts
In March 2015, three years after the changes in LASPO the Parliamentary Justice Committee reported that nine law centres had shut down -16.67% of all law centre network members in 2012 and ten such centres run by Shelter (a homelessness charity).
Furthermore, surveys have established that nearly ⅓ of women find reaching legal aid difficult, having to travel from 5 to 15 miles to find a legal aid solicitor.
Evidence accepted by the Justice Select Committee suggested that as many as 39 per cent of women eligible for legal aid through the domestic violence gateway could not meet the new strict requirements for the required evidence due to financial or bureaucratic reasons.
In 2012, when LASPO came into force legal aid was granted in 925,000 cases, while the next year that number dropped by almost 50% to 497,000. It also significantly restricted access to early legal advice, a crucial step in preventing problems from escalating to court. The number of early legal advice cases funded dropped from nearly 1 million in 2009/10 to just 130,000 in 2021/22