It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Ms Fovargue. I am also grateful to everybody who has spoken today, especially my hon. Friend the Member for Salford and Eccles (Rebecca Long Bailey) who secured this important debate. There is much consensus in the room on the importance of legal aid, as well as an appreciation of how it should work and why it is not working now.
It is fair to say that the legal aid system is broken. As Members of Parliament, we all meet constituents who are in desperate need of both civil and criminal legal aid. From housing, welfare and immigration issues to more serious criminal cases, access to legal aid is essential to protect people’s rights and livelihood. We are suffering from the serial underfunding of the entire legal aid sector, paired with a strict means test and a huge backlog in the criminal courts. We know that justice delayed is justice denied.
Thousands across the north-west are impacted by this. We have already heard a number of examples of how it impacts ordinary people’s lives in the north-west. I recently learned about a couple who were referred to the Vauxhall law centre in Liverpool. Self-employed and unable to work during the pandemic, the couple depleted their savings and eventually fell into rent arrears. When the eviction ban was lifted, their landlord issued them with an eviction notice but, by the time the claim was issued at court, the couple had returned to work, and therefore failed the means test for legal aid. Their savings had gone; their earnings barely covered their bills. Thankfully, the law centre was able to provide support and ensure that the possession order was set aside.
Law centres such as that one are providing an emergency service up and down the country, preventing people from facing destitution, homelessness and even deportation. I want to put on record my thanks to Greater Manchester Law Centre and others for that vital work. It is not right for the third sector to pick up the pieces of the Government’s mess. These issues are not new and have been festering for a decade of Tory austerity. Since 1986, there have been progressive reductions in the scope of civil and criminal legal aid, along with strict financial requirements for eligibility, culminating in LASPO in 2012.
As a result, legal aid is now accessible only to less than a quarter of the population, and only for criminal defence and some very limited areas of civil law. Civil legal aid is usually available only in the direst circumstances where specific criteria are met, such as domestic violence,
discrimination or risk of homelessness. Even when those conditions are met, there is no guarantee that a person will be granted legal aid. More than a third of women who have experienced domestic violence are unable to satisfy the Government’s strict requirements for providing proof, and are therefore denied access to legal aid. That is worsened by the fact that there is no remuneration to firms for assisting clients in gathering necessary evidence. As a result, victims must face their abusers in the family court without legal advice or representation.
Legal aid providers have also suffered considerably. Legal aid fees have not increased in more than 20 years, making it unsustainable for many firms to take on legal aid work, creating a shortage of legal aid lawyers, whose capacity to take on these cases is severely limited. The number of criminal legal aid litigators has fallen by almost 30% since 2012-13 in the north-west. The case for civil legal aid provision is even more dire, with what the Law Society describes as “advice deserts” appearing throughout the country. That means that even those who are eligible for legal aid face regional barriers to accessing it. The impacts of that can be felt across the justice system.
To put that in perspective, there are more than 47,000 outstanding criminal cases in the north-west courts. Furthermore, since 2020 there have been more than 5,000 ineffective trials in our region. Those are trials that do not go ahead as planned because of the action or inaction of the defence, the prosecution or the court, including unavailable counsel. That means that there are thousands of victims, witnesses and defendants in the north-west left without justice.
In December 2021, Sir Christopher Bellamy QC, chair of the independent review of criminal legal aid, published his report and recommendations on criminal legal aid in England and Wales. The Law Society has called on the Government to act on the review’s recommendations as quickly as possible, but they have so far failed to do so. The recent decision by the Criminal Bar Association to ballot in direct response to the Government’s failure to respond to the Bellamy review should be a cause for great concern. By the end of March, the Government will have had the Bellamy review in their lap for some four months. Victims, defendants, witnesses and criminal lawyers cannot wait any longer, because the backlog will remain stubbornly high the longer the Government take to act and risk the complete collapse of the criminal justice system.
Criminal advocates have suffered a drop of 40% in real-terms earnings for prosecuting and defending criminal cases over the past decade. That has been a result of cuts to legal aid rates across a range of offences, including murder and rape. There has also been a failure to pay anything for the dozens of extra hours a week undertaken by criminal barristers to meet the demands of the massive backlog of trials that the courts themselves are buckling under. The Government’s repeated stubbornness on fees has caused publicly minded criminal barristers and solicitors to walk from their chosen careers, meaning that their victims are being denied justice. We cannot reduce a record backlog of nearly 50,000 criminal trials if there are not enough lawyers to prosecute and defend.
Ultimately, cuts to criminal and civil legal aid while the Tories have been in power have contributed to a crisis in our criminal justice system and risk creating a
two-tier legal system. Under those circumstances, people in the north-west are at a substantial disadvantage against the parties with access to legal advice and representation, undermining the core principle of equality before the law. Without adequate legal aid, victims are denied justice and criminals left to walk our streets.
The erosion of access to legal aid represents a threat to the rule of law. It does not matter what legal rights an individual has on paper if they do not have the means to vindicate them. The Government pay lip service to levelling up the country. When will they level up access to justice?
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