For legal aid practitioners, ‘the pandemic has made a bad situation worse’, writes Rohini Teather, head of parliamentary affairs at the Legal Aid Practitioners Group, in this week’s NLJ.
One problem is the shortage of data since LASPO (the Legal Aid, Sentencing and Punishment of Offenders Act 2012). Without data about the impact of the pandemic, such as its impact on the ageing demographic of legal aid lawyers or the cross-subsidising of legal aid work with other income, it is difficult to predict market sustainability. Yet, as she points out, ‘policy-makers need this data now more than ever’.
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