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LAG’s new book on legal aid and access to justice policy, Austerity Justice, is published this week to coincide with our 40th anniversary. The book traces the development of publicly funded legal advice services, including Citizens Advice and other not for profit services, as well as the growth and decline in legal aid firms over the past 60 years. The campaign against what became the Legal Aid, Sentencing and Punishment of Offenders (LASPO) Act 2012, which received royal assent in May this year, is discussed in the book. LAG argues that the LASPO Act will leave a rump legal aid system, stripped of the ability to help people facing the everyday legal problems that a crisis such as divorce, disability or losing a job can throw at them.
The architects of the government’s legal aid policy (both recently reshuffled out of their positions at the Ministry of Justice) were the Secretary of State for Justice, Kenneth Clarke and his minister, Jonathan Djanogly. They both had little empathy for the people who will lose out on advice and representation and a poor grasp of the detail of their plans for legal aid - in negotiations with the Treasury Kenneth Clarke was not even able to recall how much he was being asked to cut from legal aid. An eleventh hour intervention from Number 10, caving into demands from Conservative backbenchers, scuppered Clarke’s planned 'rehabilitation revolution', much to the annoyance of his coalition colleagues. This meant more cash than expected had to found from legal aid cuts. As the book also reveals, Djanogly lost an internal argument over introducing competitive tendering for criminal cases which led to the bulk of the cuts having to come from civil legal aid.
Though not conceived as such, the civil legal aid system has become an important arm of the welfare state and it will be decimated by the cuts which are planned to be introduced next year. According to the government’s own estimate, 630,000 will lose out on advice. Women and disadvantaged groups such as disabled people will be the biggest losers. LAG believes civil legal aid has fallen victim to a few powerful politicians’ casual indifference to the government’s responsibility to ensure effective redress and equality before the law for their fellow citizens regardless of means.
Campaigners opposed to the legal aid cuts included Justice for All, which was supported by LAG. Justice for All was a broad coalition of charities including Scope, the national disability charity, and the National Federation of Women’s Institutes, as well as organisations with a direct interest in legal aid such as the Law Society. Due to the strength of opposition to the government’s proposals some important concessions were made by ministers as the bill was debated in parliament, such as a change in the definition of domestic violence which victims need to meet to qualify for legal aid.
Crossbench peers in the House of Lords played an outstanding role in opposing the worst of the government’s proposals. They were mainly responsible, in combination with the Labour Opposition led by Lord Bach, for inflicting a hefty 14 defeats on the LASPO Bill in the Lords. With a few notable exceptions, such as the Liberal Democrat peer Lady Doocey and the Conservative peer Lord Newton, who opposed the proposals with an inspirational degree of moral courage, government parliamentarians trooped through the lobbies in support of the cuts to legal aid. Many of them felt compelled to do so as they were wrongly convinced that the bill was an essential part of the government’s deficit reduction policy.
Austerity Justice describes the tipping point which was reached over the future of legal aid between members of the coalition government. Liberal Democrats disagreed with Clarke’s attempt to impose a once and for all redesign of the civil legal aid system, closing off any chance that areas of law could be brought back into the scope of legal aid. As revealed in the book, at a key internal meeting of leading Lib Dem parliamentarians, Lord McNally, who was responsible for steering the LASPO Bill through the Lords, was told 'the bill failed all tests of Liberal Democrat policy'. After pressure from its coalition partners, the Labour Opposition and crossbench peers, the government eventually conceded that amendments to the scope of legal aid could be made in the future. LAG believes that making the argument for this will ultimately determine whether the low point which the LASPO Act represents for access to justice is permanent or not.
Order Austerity Justice online: www.lag.org.uk/books.