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Criminal legal aid changes announced
In what the Lord Chancellor Chris Grayling described as the ‘final decision on a modified model of competitive tendering for criminal legal aid contracts,’ the government released its response to the criminal legal aid consultation last month: Transforming legal aid – next steps: government response. According to the Ministry of Justice (MoJ), over 18,000 responses were received to the two consultations it ran over the issue. A few government concessions have been made but, according to Carol Storer, director of the Legal Aid Practitioners Group, if the proposals are implemented they will have a ‘devastating impact on the numbers of firms and access to justice’.
The fee cuts will go ahead as planned, with the first cut of 8.75 per cent being implemented on 20 March. A second fee cut will follow in June 2015 to coincide with the commencement of the new criminal contracts. Firms will be invited to tender for own client contracts in April and there will be a tender round for police station duty contracts in July. The duty contracts represent the most significant change as they will be limited to 525, spread across the 97 procurement areas, which are largely unchanged from the original consultation published in April last year.
‘This throws everything up in the air,’ said Carol Storer. ‘We are going from a situation in which around 16,000 firms employ or contract with accredited representatives, to a much reduced number of police station duty slots.’ She predicts that many firms will lose out.
Measures to assist the cash flow of providers were announced by the MoJ. These include interim payments for lengthy Crown Court cases. Some adjustments were made to the fee proposals which will also benefit practitioners, including a commitment to continue to pay fees in trials which do not go ahead at the last minute, known as cracked trials.