If the Legal Aid Agency is to have a future it should be focused on enabling access to justice not refusing legal aid, says Jon Robins
It is a bitter irony that the one part of the Ministry of Justice seemingly untouched by austerity (until recently, at least) has been the Legal Aid Agency’s (LAA’s) own running costs. Despite decades of frozen legal aid rates followed by the recent round of brutal cuts, the administrative costs of the LAA have been heading north since it was created in 2013. Meanwhile, the ministry’s overall budget having been cut by 25% since LASPO (the Legal Aid, Sentencing and Punishment of Offenders Act 2012).
The Bach Commission on Access to Justice, published last month, has called for the LAA to be axed—as has the Legal Aid Practitioners Group (LAPG) which published the second edition of its manifesto last week ( Manifesto for Legal Aid , Legal Aid Practitioners Group, 2nd edition 2017). Rightly, both groups focus their energies on the damage inflicted by the cuts that were introduced
