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13 March 2017 / Steve Hynes
Issue: 7739 / Categories: Opinion , Legal aid focus , Profession
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Criminal actions

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Will the government learn from past criminal legal aid mistakes, asks Steve Hynes

Michael Gove’s time at the Ministry of Justice (MoJ) was mainly marked by a series of policy u-turns which dismantled the legacy of his predecessor, Chris Grayling, and earned him plaudits from the legal profession. For legal aid, it was the abandonment of two-tier contracts in criminal legal aid which was perhaps the most dramatic of his policy reversals. This was forced on him by a combination of effective campaigning by criminal legal aid lawyers and bad advice from his civil servants. Gove’s successor, Liz Truss, seems to not to have learnt any lessons from this debacle and is heading for another showdown with criminal legal aid lawyers.

Two-tier contracts

Successive legal aid administrators have been attracted to the idea of putting duty work for police and magistrates’ court work out to tender. In March 2009, the then Labour government announced it was going to introduce a system of best value tendering (BVT) for the work. At the time many practitioners feared that it would lead to cost reductions at the

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