Trying to defeat claims about ‘fat-cat legal aid lawyers’ with hard evidence ‘is a very lawyer thing to do’, she said during a panel discussion, held ahead of a performance of Rebecca Lenkiewicz’s play, The Invisible. ‘But you don’t counter a story with statistics, you can only counter a story with another story. The story of legal aid that the government and the media tell is that there is too much of it; the wrong people are getting it; lawyers are doing too well out of it – and anyway, we can’t afford it. We need to tell a better story about legal aid.’

Other panelists in the debate – ‘Why defend legal aid in an age of austerity?’ – included Richard Miller, Law Society head of legal aid, who has led its campaign against the LASPO cuts. Miller recounted a recent conversation with a practitioner in Wales.

‘I asked, what’s happening to people who would previously have qualified for legal aid? He told me about a client with a housing matter, one of those where there was some serious disrepair and other issues. Once the court had granted the order for the landlord to make the repairs, the Legal Aid Agency said: “OK. The legal aid bit is completed. We’re pulling the plug.” Leaving the client completely stranded in trying to resolve the other problems. That client committed suicide.’

Miller added that he had heard of other similar examples.

Lenkiewicz’s play includes a similar storyline, where an elderly man is driven to despair at being unable to get legal advice following the LASPO cuts.

Taking up the storytelling theme, panellist Sue James, solicitor at Hammersmith & Fulham Law Centre, said: ‘The play made me think about Dickens. If he just wrote about facts and figures, we wouldn’t still be thinking about poverty and deprivation in the same way. His message is still relevant today and it’s nearly 200 years old.’

Lenkiewicz had spent time at the law centre researching the play and based some of its scenes on James’s clients.

Earlier in the debate, Miller (pictured) had told the audience of theatregoers that in 1980, 80 per cent of households qualified for some form of legal aid help. Up until 1990, the rates paid to legal aid lawyers ‘were a small amount below what they would charge private clients’, but there had been no increase in cash terms since then. ‘Rates are now a quarter of what lawyers would charge private clients.’

He added that in 2004, the legal aid budget was £2bn a year. By comparison, ‘during the Blair years’, the NHS budget grew each year by three times that amount. ‘So, the entire cost of ensuring people can enforce their rights is just a third of that annual £6bn increase in the NHS budget.’

Bawdon said the experience of migrants’ rights groups in America shows the potential for changing the debate around a previously unpopular issue. In the US, campaigners had succeeded in winning important legislative changes after linking migration to the idea of the American Dream.