Over the new year, I read the suite of seven final reports of the Ministry of Justice’s review of civil legal aid. I did so with a heavy heart. For what is now nigh on a half century, too many of these attempts to identify ‘evidence-based options’ for future legal aid policy have rolled across my desk like tumbleweed through a Western desert. This version suffers from the crucial structural weaknesses of most of its predecessors. But, within those limitations, there are, to quote Leonard Cohen, some cracks where ‘the light gets in’.
Structural weaknesses
And the structural weaknesses endemic to this sort of exercise? The first is political, and the second methodological. This review was established in January 2023 by Dominic Raab, a now deservedly forgotten footnote to history as Boris Johnson’s one-time deputy prime minister. It was designed—after more than a decade in power had exposed the poverty of the
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