Professor Michael Zander QC reports on the government’s dusty response to the Constitutional Affairs Committee report on the Carter reforms
The Constitutional Affairs Committee’s report on the Carter reforms of legal aid, Implementation of the Carter Review of Legal Aid, HC 223, was probably the committee’s sharpest ever critique of government policy (See NLJ, 22 June 2007, pp 872–74 and NLJ, 29 June 2007, pp 912–14).
Despite this, the government’s 50-page response, published on 22 June, rejected all the criticisms and promised that the reforms would go ahead as planned (see Implementing Legal Aid Reform: Government Response to the Constitutional Affairs Select Committee Report, Cm 7158).
The response asserted that controlling costs is not, in and of itself, the goal of the reform programme and that “the aim of improved efficiency and better control over spending is, ultimately, to ensure that more people can be helped by legal aid within the resources available, without any reduction in quality, and in a way that contributes to, and benefits from, improved efficiency in the wider justice systems” (para 33).
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The select committee
