IN BRIEF
New Queen’s Counsel appointments
LAG would like to congratulate Kate Markus, Leslie Thomas and Marc Willers on their appointment as practising Queen’s Counsel (QC), and Saimo Chahal and Nicola Mackintosh on being made honorary QC. The appointments ceremony will take place in London on 14 April 2014.
Law Centre closures
Cross Street Law Centre® in Kent (formerly Thamesmead Law Centre) and Barnet Law Service in north west London are in the process of closing down. LAG understands that Greenwich Community Law Centre in south east London is also to shut. In January, Trafford Law Centre and Wythenshawe Advice and Law Centre, which were both based in Manchester, closed. The cuts to the scope of civil legal aid introduced under the Legal Aid, Sentencing and Punishment of Offenders Act 2012 in April last year have been blamed for this spate of Law Centre closures.
Peers question government on legal aid
Crossbench peer Lord Low, who chaired the Low Commission on the Future of Advice and Legal Support, initiated a short debate in the House of Lords to ask the government for its response to the commission’s report, Tackling the advice deficit. Opening the debate, Lord Low said that the commission, which was established by LAG, was ‘anxious to develop a fresh approach’ to providing assistance to the public. He stressed the higher priority public legal education should play in assisting people with social welfare law problems, and argued that while the commission was not recommending ‘a simple restoration of the cuts, that does not mean that we would not like to see any of them reversed’.
Labour peer Lord Bach, the former legal aid minister, questioned the government about what assessment it had made of the extent to which the exceptional cases rule under Legal Aid, Sentencing and Punishment of Offenders (LASPO) Act 2012 s10 ‘is working as intended’. Lord Faulks, the minister of state at the Ministry of Justice, answered that the government considers that the scheme ‘is working effectively’. He confirmed that, at the time of the debate, the total number of exceptional case applications received was 1,030, 31 of which had been granted. He accepted that this was ‘a small percentage’ when compared with the government’s prediction during the passage of the LASPO Bill that there would be 5,000 to 7,000 applications a year.
■ Hansard, HL Debates cols 893–918, 25 February 2014 and Hansard, HL Debates cols 529–531, 11 February 2014.
Justice Alliance petition
The Justice Alliance petition to ‘save legal aid to protect access to justice for all’ needs at least 100,000 signatures to force a House of Commons debate on this issue (see February 2014 Legal Action 4). At the time of writing, 16,754 supporters had signed the petition.