Andy Slaughter and Alistair Carmichael: The Government has hobbled the legal aid system

It’s now five years since the Legal Aid, Sentencing and Punishment of Offenders Act (LASPO) came into effect and, with the Government’s post-implementation Review due to be published at the end of this year, it is the perfect time to debate the future of Legal Aid.

So, we are grateful to the Backbench Business Committee for granting a three-hour debate on 1 November. There is considerable interest from MPs from all parties, not least because many have seen an increasing number of constituents approaching them for early help and advice as more and more areas of the country become advice deserts following the LASPO cuts.

It is pretty clear to everybody that the system is broken and that the effect of LASPO has been not just to reduce budgets but to hobble the whole Legal Aid system.

The Review follows a whole series of reports by the National Audit Office, Public Accounts Committee, Joint Committee on Human Rights, Bar Council, Law Society, Lord Bach and Lord Low that were consistent in finding LASPO had failed. Damningly, the Justice Select Committee held that of all its objectives the only one LASPO had achieved was to reduce Government spend in this area.

Whole areas of help have been removed from scope, leaving millions of people unable to get advice or representation. There has been an almost complete collapse in early legal advice, meaning that cases now escalate and are resolved, if at all, after becoming much more complex, traumatic and expensive.

For example, during the passage of the LASPO Act, the Government argued that removing Legal Aid from most private law family matters would increase the uptake of mediation so that families could resolve their problems outside of court. The Government predicted an increase of 9,000 mediation assessments and 10,000 mediation cases for the year 2013-14.

Instead, there was a decrease of 17,246 mediation assessments in the year after the reforms and the number of mediation cases starting fell by 5,177 cases in the same period. One reason for this was the withdrawal of firms from these areas of law leaving no one to signpost litigants to mediation.

LASPO cuts have also brought about a huge rise in the number of litigants in person appearing before courts. The Personal Support Unit reports that in 2010-11 their staff and volunteers helped people without access to a lawyer on about 7,000 occasions. By 2017-18, that number had rocketed to more than 65,000.

We’re calling, as an absolute minimum for the Government to restore access to early advice, restore Legal Aid for areas of social welfare law such as benefits, housing and immigration and to simplify the criteria for applying for Legal Aid.

We have no doubt that the arguments for restoring credibility to the Legal Aid system will be persuasively put on 1 November from all sides of the House. Hopefully, we will also get a serious response from the Minister replying to the debate. That has been sadly lacking thus far, meaning an essential part of civil society has been weakened and the needs of millions of our fellow citizens are going unrepresented. 

Andy Slaughter is Labour MP for Hammersmith and Alistair Carmichael is Liberal Democrat MP for Orkney and Shetland and the party's chief whip. Their Westminster Hall debate on the future of legal aid will take place on Thursday 1 November.

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