Jon Robins welcomes Lord Bach’s proposal to put legal advice on a par with the right to free healthcare & education
There are many recommendations in the long-awaited report of the Bach Commission on Access to Justice published last week; but there is one big idea: ‘a new legally enforceable right to justice’. Coming after a number of post-LASPO (Legal Aid Sentencing and Punishment of Offenders Act) reports in recent months—ironically, the government’s own review of its legislation remains nowhere in sight—Lord Willy Bach and his fellow commissioners needed ‘a big idea’ to stand out from the crowd.
It is often said that legal aid is ‘a pillar of the welfare state’. If that’s true, our system of publicly-funded law has become so enfeebled that it is no longer load-bearing. The introduction of a right to justice is compelling because it re-establishes the connection between our system of legal aid to the principles upon which the welfare state was built.
The proportion of the population eligible for legal aid collapsed from eight out of 10 people in 1980 to less than one third of the
