You cannot have democracy, civil rights and a rule of law without access to justice, and you can’t have access to justice without Legal Aid. So said speaker after speaker in interesting waistcoats. And they are right of course. There is no access to justice for millions in this country, and the move to fixed fees will decrease it further by driving more legal aid practises out of business.
As much as this is all true, I found I had more sympathy for the lone dissenting voice of Elizabeth Dukes. Why is it that Legal Aid costs £34 per person in this country and only £4 per person in Germany and £1 in Sweden? Is Napoleonic justice cheaper? Is an ‘accusatorial’ system intrinsically more expensive? Or is there less casual criminality by landlords and local authorities in these countries? I think we should be told. Yet none of the other speakers addressed this.
The fact is that a vast swathe of the population is excluded from civil justice, being above benefit levels, and not rich. The cost of extending civil legal aid this far is not even funny. What we need are cheaper and more accessible kinds of justice – tribunals for tenancy disputes and the like, rather than insisting on gold plated procedures and then scraping all the gold off to be melted down and sold.
It is diffcult to demand cheap and cheerful justice without images of firing squads. And I wouldn’t want swathes of law subcontracted to the sharia courts. But nor do I want a policy on legal aid that has clearly been written from the perspective of the lawyers, with an eye on their current customer base.
In moving, Bridget Fox told the joke: What is the difference between a lawyer and God? God knows he’s not a lawyer. Yes, I believe you are human beings really, and that legal aid practises are going out of business, and this is wrong, and we should defend what access there is. But let’s, please, look at the bigger picture.
* Sheffield blogger Joe Otten kindly agreed to help cover policy debates at conference for Lib Dem Voice
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2 Comments
Thank you for posting about this. I did plan to write something about our motion for LDV but ran out of time… Lizzie made two good points; that we spend a lot on legal aid, and that there are lots of alternatives, such as mediation, which deserve more support.
On the latter point, yes there are, and if the motion had been “A 21st century approach to resolving legal disputes” no doubt we would have talked about mediation. But the motion was about the attack on legal aid.
If cases can be resolved amicably outside court that’s obviously better for all concerned. But many cases do go to court – and many more are going to court now precisely because of government policy, whether its the raft of new offences around anti-social behaviour, or civil cases on child support, debt, or access to social care or lifesaving drugs. Without a robust network of legal aid lawyers, even people who are entitled to legal aid cannot exercise that right, as Emily Gasson showed in the debate.
Think about the worst pieces of casework you’ve had: the family of five facing eviction because the oldest son was an offender; the pensioner faced with crippling bills after mis-selling of phone services; the mother of two learning-disabled sons finding the care criteria had changed in the two years’ separating their births. These are the people who need legal aid services, not the lawyers. The real fat cat lawyers are in the City not on the shabby benches at your local court.
There is an issue about the size of the legal aid bill. But this Government’s answer to the cost problem – a flat rate fixed fee followed by transition to CCT, is flawed. Fixed fees are a disaster and are driving legal aid lawyers out of practice, so that, as Alan Beith said, when the Government comes to do CCT, there won’t be a competitive market for tendering.
Our motion calls for the Government to pilot different funding arrangements in different areas and see what works before imposing a solution. These approaches could include CCT; a two-tier scheme with a rota for simple cases plus referrals for complex ones (think GP/specialist); or giving defendants an allowance of fixed fee plus so many ‘hours’ depending on the case. I don’t understand why Lizzie objected to that approach.
Lots of law-abiding folk think that you will only need a laywer if you are sad, mad or bad. Not so.
One of the reasons I’m passionate about this agenda is my own experience of being unjustly accused. Some of you will remember the Islington Standards Board case. The then Labour leader of the opposition on Islingotn Council made regular Standards Boards complaints about the then Lib Dem leader, Steve Hitchins. One of these complaints had to be either totally groundless or evidence of a conspiracy involving an entire committee. The investigator took the latter view and accused 5 of us with multiple breaches of the local government code of conduct, which could have ended our political careers and damaged our reputations for life outside politics too.
Eventually – after three years’ of investigation and hearings – we were cleared. Even though no complaint had ever been made about my conduct, and I knew the charges were nonsense, it was an incredibly stressful, Kafkaesque experience. The investigators had no understanding of political or local government culture and put the most damaging interpretation on the most normal things – like making phonecalls out of 9-5 office hours.
Without our very good lawyers who knows what might have happened. As one of my friends said at the time, virtue may be its own reward in the courts of heaven; in the courts of the land, you need a lawyer. We managed to raise the funds from family, friends and colleagues (there are no costs provisions for tribunals in Standards Board cases). Not everyone can do that. One reason why providing legal support for members is a primary function of trades unions.
Legal aid means that no-one who needs a lawyer will lose out. Why would any Liberal Democrat want to see that?
Bridget, I agree with what you say, but I would still like an answer to the question of why it is so much more expensive here than elsewhere in Europe.
Do people in the EU not have any rights to protect? Hush, don’t tell UKIP.
Or is the huge demand and huge bill simply a consequence of the fact that our protection of legal rights is so poor, that it is worthwhile for infringers of those rights to ‘try it on’ with impugnity.