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Reforms will cut off law centre’s advice hotline
• MANY people in Islington find it hard to get the advice and help they need, and a real increase in provision would be extremely welcome.
However, Martin Seel’s letter paints a misleading picture (Reforms aim to spread legal aid, July 13). From October, the Legal Services Commission (LSC) will be introducing a new framework for legal aid that will mean all providers will be paid a flat rate for assisting a client in many categories of law.
There will be no London weighting, despite the fact that the costs of providing services in London are greater than in many other parts of the country. More worryingly, many solicitors or advisers will be expected to see three or even four times as many clients in order to meet the new LSC targets. We will be expected to do far more short cases, and far fewer longer cases (such as homelessness or employment discrimination).
This will mean that people whose cases are more complex, or who will need to spend more time with their caseworker (perhaps because they do not speak English, or they have difficulty reading complex documents), will find it even more difficult to find someone to take on their case.
Agencies that have spent years developing expertise in difficult cases and/or working with vulnerable client groups will be expected to change their profile completely, making it much more difficult for people to get help.
Islington Law Centre currently offers telephone advice via its LSC contract. Although very cost effective, this will not be possible under the new arrangements, and the many hundreds of clients we assist via telephone advice each year will lose the ability to speak to a local and highly-skilled practitioner for initial advice.
The LSC’s plans have faced widespread opposition from legal aid providers, and from the Constitutional Affairs Select Committee report on legal aid reform. Any increase in provision that is achieved will simply come from spreading an already stretched service even more thinly. Many agencies will simply close or withdraw from legal aid work.
We are grateful to MP Jeremy Corbyn and to local councillors for taking up this issue and very much hope LSC will reconsider its plans, and ensure the service that is provided really meets the needs of local people and can achieve a long-term improvement in the quality of people’s lives.
RUTH HAYES
Centre director, Islington Law Centre
• MARTIN Seel writes that “the current legal aid reforms are about increasing the number of people helped by legal aid in the future”.
In fact, the introduction of means testing in October last year has reduced the number of people represented in the magistrates’ court by excluding 80 per cent of taxpayers from access to legally-aided representation. A significant proportion of the poorest 20 per cent of the population also find themselves ineligible because of the bureaucratic complexities involved.
The proposed reforms will reduce these numbers further still. In April this year, the Constitutional Affairs Select Committee reported that “if the reforms go ahead there is a serious risk to access to justice among the most vulnerable in society”. The report went on to say that the Legal Services Commission’s intention to impose fixed fees followed by competitive tendering across the entire legal aid system is “a breathtaking risk”.
I write as a trainee solicitor committed to the legal aid sector, in which, as the Otterburn Report points out, firms are already working at the limits of viability.
Mr Seel is right to point out that the current reforms in legal aid were intended to reduce solicitors’ fees while increasing the volume of work they do. The future is bleak for me. More importantly, the future is bleak for those who will be unable to get the help they need which, as Mr Seel rightly says, is fundamental to both legal and social justice.
NAME AND ADDRESS SUPPLIED
• I DO not know in which world Martin Seel’s utopian land of legal services exists. It certainly isn’t at Highbury Corner Magistrates’ Court, where half of my work as a criminal solicitor takes place.
Hundreds of cases are delayed while the means test for legal aid takes place. People clearly eligible for legal aid are refused because “the computer says no”.
There is a temptation to think the defendants are “other people”, not like you and me. Some of them are but most of them are not. For instance, there is the 44-year-old man, never in trouble before, who finds himself in the wrong pub during a match at the new Arsenal stadium, arrested with a load of others and facing a football banning order which will require him to submit his passport and not come within five miles of every Premiership, league and international match. This will cripple his fledgling business.
Another gentleman, no legal aid granted, so he submits the necessary written document in his defence. The prosecution ignores it because it is “not in the correct format”. How is he supposed to know what that is and why is the prosecution taking advantage of the fact that he is unrepresented.
Then there is the woman who, having never been in trouble before, fights back on the Tube after being harassed and bad-mouthed by a group of teenage girls. They claim she assaulted them. No legal aid for her either.
These are ordinary people who are now more likely to end up with convictions as a result of this squeeze, and who are not lucky enough to be part of the lucky 7,592 helped in Islington last year. They can’t afford to pay for representation.
It is not just the means testing. The “interests of justice test” is harder to meet.
What used to be manageable chaos has become a shambolic mess where no one gets justice, least of all the wife who has to be cross-examined by her husband, who is accused of assaulting her. You can’t force him to pay for a solicitor, can you?
Not to worry though, at least I have the good fortune of being a “BME” (black and minority ethnic or whatever the LSC wants to call me now) solicitor in a “non-BME firm”. While my prospects of equity are limited, at least my firm won’t go under, like hundreds of BME firms disproportionately affected by the changes.
I would normally be happy to provide my name and address, were it not for this terrible rumour that the LSC is keeping names of all the individuals and firms who have the gall to publicly object to the proposals in any way. To what end, who knows?
NAME AND ADDRESS SUPPLIED
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