The recent spate of consultations on legal aid has got us at Young Legal Aid Lawyers (YLAL) thinking about the ways in which we respond to chronic government inaction in the face of the legal aid crisis.

In March 2019, the then YLAL co-chairs wrote about the Ministry of Justice’s (MoJ's) response to the Post-implementation review of Part 1 of the Legal Aid, Sentencing and Punishment of Offenders Act 2012 (LASPO) (CP 37, February 2019), in the form of the Legal Support Action Plan (Legal support: the way ahead, CP 40, February 2019).1See April 2019 Legal Action 18. There was some cautious optimism that the MoJ had arrived at the view that LASPO had damaged access to justice and failed to meet its own objectives. As the co-chairs wrote, ‘we now know that, at least in some respects, the view that “something must be done” did infiltrate the walls of 102 Petty France’.

Unfortunately, the premonition they had – that ‘something’ would simply be a further review or pilot – has come true. As we all know, the fundamental problems of legal aid have gone unaddressed. Optimists might argue that the consultations announced this year are well timed given the new lord chancellor is ‘one of our own’ or because a general election is fast approaching, but it is hard to escape the feeling that we’ve been here before.

YLAL is continuing to engage with the Review of Civil Legal Aid as it makes its way through its earliest stages. Our members made submissions to the recent consultations by the National Audit Office (Value for money from legal aid) and the MoJ (Legal aid fees in the Illegal Migration Bill). Like many organisations with a policy function, our members have spent countless hours collecting data, preparing submissions, filling in online forms and working late into the night on consultation deadlines.

We want our members to contribute to consultations and for the perspectives of young legal aid lawyers to be heard. This is one of the main reasons that YLAL exists: to amplify the voice of young legal aid lawyers in spaces from which, traditionally, we have been excluded. We have been successful in opening doors that had previously been closed.

We also know that there is an inherent value in responding to consultations, not least because, for organisations like ours, they present a useful opportunity to collect valuable data and insights from our members, help us articulate policy positions, and create material that we are then able to use in other forms of campaigning and advocacy. However, we are acutely aware of consultation fatigue among many of our members. After all, there are only so many ways and so many times you can say ‘legal aid is broken’.

Confronted with a government that already says that it's investing millions into legal aid, and an opposition who are increasingly saying there’s simply not enough money, it feels we can no longer rely on the same actions on which we, as a sector, have historically drawn to deal with inaction. The pages of this magazine have seen many calls for radical action to confront the legal aid crisis in the past – perhaps what we now need is not so much radical action, but a move towards more conventional, collective action.

We are, after all, in a period of collective action and unionisation that is unprecedented in recent times. Legal aid lawyers have much in common with doctors, nurses, transport workers and teachers. Like them, we provide an important public service that has been cut right down to the bone and now functions largely on the discretionary effort of workers. Like them, we have sounded the alarm time and time again about the crisis in our sector and have been met with little more than a shrug. Given what others have achieved through unionising, why aren’t more legal aid lawyers doing the same?

Prompted by the interest of our members, we will be hosting an event in the coming months to further the conversation about unionising in the legal sector, led by our members who have already joined a union and have experience of collective action.

Recent efforts to organise in the legal sector have borne fruit, although they have not been without their challenges – there is the inherent challenge of a split profession alongside the fact that, on the solicitors’ side, individual workers do not have a direct relationship with the Legal Aid Agency.

The criminal bar strike last year is an obvious example of collective action resulting in concessions, although many of our members felt let down by the circumstances that led to strike action being discontinued. The Legal Sector Workers United (LSWU) branch of the United Voices of the World (UVW) union, set up in 2019, sparked a much-needed conversation in the legal sector about the need to unionise. Through organising in their workplace, UVW members in a large legal aid law firm secured better pay, including sick pay. Now much of the energy and interest generated by LSWU has found a new home in Unite the Union’s legal workers’ branch.

Unionising is not a panacea, but it does bring with it the possibility of new avenues and methods of action from which the whole legal aid sector can benefit, and that can complement what is already being done. The time is ripe, it seems, to discover that there is power in a union.