Even though legal aid is available for people seeking asylum, there is uneven access to advice across Britain.
Based on empirical research, this book offers fresh thinking on what has gone wrong in the legal aid market. It presents a rare picture of the barristers, solicitors and caseworkers practising immigration law in charities and private firms. In doing so, this book examines supply and demand and illuminates what constitutes high-quality legal aid work/provision, subsequent conflicts with financial rationality and how practitioners resolve these issues.
Challenging existing legal aid policy, this book presents innovative insights to ensure public service markets around the globe function well for all those involved.
Originally introduced as a form of social welfare with near-universal eligibility, legal aid in the UK is now framed as a benefit external to the legal system and understood in primarily economic terms. This book is the first to evaluate the recent reforms of UK legal aid from a social policy perspective and assess their impact on family law courts and advocacy.
Written by experts in the field, it focuses on the rise in people representing their own legal case and argues that the reforms effectively ‘delawyerise’ disputes, producing a more inquisitorial justice system and impacting the litigants, court system, staff and process.
Arguing for a more holistic concept of the reforms, the book will be of relevance to students, academics, policy-makers, judges, campaigners and social workers, not just in England and Wales, but in other jurisdictions instituting cuts to their legal aid budgets, such as Australia, Scotland, France, and the Netherlands.
1 1 LEGAL AID IN CRISIS Introduced in England and Wales as part of the mid-20th-century move towards welfarism, legal aid is currently undergoing the most radical set of reforms in its 65-year history. This is part of a global shift. Many economically developed countries have embarked on sweeping reforms to legal aid, and this book considers the cuts in England and Wales in this context. Given the scale and nature of the shift in legal aid provision, the issue has received surprisingly little media attention. As we write this introductory chapter, most
This book argues throughout for a whole-system approach to legal aid, in any category of law. That approach means there is a need to develop frameworks for understanding demand and supply, the conflict between quality, financial viability and client access, and the system factors which drive those. Within such frameworks, rising demand (if unaffordable) can be addressed not by reducing the scope of legal aid (or any other service), but by changing the system to create less need. Building those frameworks requires an understanding of the context and history of
69 5 REFOCUSING THE DEBATE ABOUT LEGAL AID We started this book by suggesting that recent reforms represent a wholesale shift in the operation and meaning of legal aid in England and Wales. Once seen as a form of social welfare, since the mid-1980s legal aid has come to be framed as a benefit operating extrinsically to the legal system and understood in primarily economic terms. The most striking evidence of this is the focus in policy debates on the cost of legal aid to the taxpayer. This framing has become so dominant as to normalise the idea that
57 4 TOWARDS A HOLISTIC CONCEPTION OF LEGAL AID The previous chapter examined the evidence on the impact of the recent reforms to legal aid. We argued there that policy debate and research has focused almost entirely on the decline of publicly funded legal representation and its impact on courtroom proceedings. The cuts to civil legal advice and assistance have received very little attention, with the notable exception of the Low Commission’s (2014; 2015) recent reports on social welfare law. This gap is particularly surprising given that, on closer
305 Social welfare law and the parallel legal aid service Steve Hynes With challenging budget cuts ahead, this article looks back to the origins of civil legal aid and the long development of services that have advised and represented on social welfare law. It also considers recent attempts to join up services and the legacy inherited by the new coalition government. The civil legal aid system was founded in 1949. Lord Rushcliffe, who had been appointed by the government to report on establishing the system, envisaged that it would give access to justice to
15 2 LEGAL AID REFORM IN HISTORICAL AND INTERNATIONAL PERSPECTIVE Legal aid, broadly-conceived, has a long history. As Pollock notes, help to cover the costs of legal dispute ‘has existed as long as the law itself ’ (Pollock, 1975: 9). He’s thinking, in the main, about the charitable and often ad hoc support provided by lawyers. Statutory protections date back to an Act passed in 1495 that allowed Justices in the superior courts to order legal advocates to advise and represent litigants who lacked the means to pay (Pollock, 1975: 10). Special provision
133 9 Marketisation and competition in criminal legal aid: implications for access to justice Tom Smith and Ed Johnston Introduction Legal aid, particularly in criminal justice, is a divisive subject. For its most devoted proponents, state funding of legal representation and advice for those accused of crime is a vital public good which helps to uphold values of fairness, justice and equality. For its most virulent critics, criminal legal aid is a wasteful, bloated relic from a bygone era of state intervention, serving primarily to help criminals escape
predicament (Prince, 2001 ). Referring to UK public services, Clarke would call this particular context ‘the financial crisis of the state and fiscalization of policy discourses’ (2005, p. 213). A rise in austerity politics can generally be said to incite new government policies which impact upon our daily lives. In ‘Austerity Britain’, the contested policies that cut legal aid funding and court system financing threaten justice and the rule of law, which are the very foundations of the legal systems in England and Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland. The UK’s legal
