Jon Robins reports on the deterioration of legal aid
Do you remember legal aid? The question isn’t meant to be facetious. No doubt, there’s a small but committed section of the NLJ readership resolutely dedicated to publicly-funded law (and a rather larger section that used to be). New figures published in last month’s Legal Action indicate that, while legal aid might still be an income stream for practitioners, it is increasingly an irrelevance as far as many of their clients are concerned.
Welfare
Our current legal aid system was, as readers well know, conceived as part of the welfare state in 1949, at a time when free access to justice was viewed as no less a fundamental right than free education or healthcare. The legal aid scheme then covered eight out of 10 people and cover remained at two thirds of the population into the mid-1980s.
New Labour came into power in 1997 promising a new community legal service and eligibility levels were down to 52%. The government currently spends £2bn of taxpayers’ money a year on publicly funded legal advice—barely enough to keep the
