why is this an important issue?

Legal aid helps ordinary people facing extraordinary problems – for example, in relation to debt, welfare benefits, landlord and tenant problems, discrimination at work or community care needs. Most people don’t think they will ever have to use legal aid – but if their circumstances change for the worse then they may need to rely on it The legal aid scheme should be accepted as part of the welfare state – like the National Health Service and the state education system. But legal aid represents a tiny fraction of public spending – only 0.45 per cent.

the community legal service - a sunk flagship?

Launched in April 2000, the Community Legal Service (CLS) was a flagship policy of the new Labour government. It was intended to provide a seamless network of legal information, advice and representation services throughout the country. Funding was supposed to come partly from civil legal aid through the Legal Services Commission (LSC), and also from other sources such as local authorities. But ’advice deserts’ are getting bigger, with some communities having almost no advice agencies or legal aid firms. Although the LSC has invested in telephone advice, this is no replacement for specialist, face-to-face legal services. Over the past five years, there has been an 18 per cent drop in the number of advice cases started under legal aid.

pressures on legal aid budget

The LSC now has to contain legal aid within a fixed budget - currently around £2.1 billion per year. This covers criminal defence work, as well as advice and representation for civil and family law cases. Criminal legal aid can’t be capped: it needs to be widely available so that the government can meet its legal obligations to protect the interests of suspects and defendants – in particular, to ensure a fair hearing at all stages of the criminal justice process. But civil legal aid is coming under pressure from rising expenditure on criminal cases. Lord Falconer, the Lord Chancellor, recently admitted that civil legal aid spending has fallen by 22 per cent since 1997.

why is more being spent on criminal legal aid?

Over the past three years alone, expenditure on criminal legal aid has gone up by over 35 per cent, for reasons that are not fully understood. External pressures on the criminal defence budget are difficult to control. But the government has not got to grips with the pressures on legal aid from its own criminal justice policies. The factors driving up expenditure could well include:

solicitors abandoning legal aid work

Legal aid is now delivered through a tightly controlled system of contracts. High street solicitors have become increasingly demoralised by the bureaucratic and inflexible contract system and by poor rates of pay. Those who can are pulling out of this work. There are fears that central and local government does not understand the importance of specialist legal representation in the landscape of advice. Newly qualified lawyers are reluctant to pursue this work as a career.