The Fight Against LASPO Continues

Despite The Legal Aid, Sentencing and Punishment of Offenders Act 2012 (LASPO) having gained Royal Assent on 1 May this year, legal groups have vowed to press on with their fight against the legal aid cuts.

Legal Action Group (LAG) director Steve Hynes said campaign work could focus on s 92 of LASPO, which gives the government discretion to bring areas of the law back into scope. It could be used, for example, to re-instate legal aid for family law if the family courts were unable to cope. Hynes says, “It is a misconceived and unjust piece of legislation and we will be continuing to campaign against it.” He says LAG plans to “make it an election issue” for the 2015 general election.

Lord Bach, the peer who led Labour’s opposition to LASPO, stepped down as shadow legal aid minister just a couple of days before the measure received royal assent. He condemned the act, which seeks to save £350m a year by cutting legal aid scope and eligibility, as “outrageous legislation”’ that will harm the “disabled, poor and vulnerable, and those least able to defend themselves”.

The act removes legal aid for vast areas of law, including most private family work, welfare benefits, housing, debt, employment and clinical negligence. In passionate speeches against the bill, Bach called the cuts, “ludicrous”, “counter-productive”, “immoral” and “wicked”.

Bach took to social media site Twitter to campaign against the bill, styling himself with the appropriate handle @FightBach. He can barely disguise his anger at the way the cuts have been made, saying, “If it was done at a time of plenty it would be bad enough, but to be done at a time of austerity is absolutely shocking”. What is particularly insidious about the legislation, he says, is that it works to the government’s advantage, denying people the chance to get the help they need to challenge decisions made by arms of the state.

With the passing of the act, Bach says the British justice system, admired throughout the world, has lost something “very precious”, by denying its open citizens access to justice. “It’s all very well and a good thing having Russian multi-millionaires fighting their cases in London courts, but what a contrast to taking out of our justice system the poorest and the most vulnerable”.

The government lost 14 votes in the House of Lords, the second biggest rebellion in parliamentary history. Lord Bach commends those within parliament and campaigners outside who fought to oppose the bill, praising the Law Society’s ‘first class’ campaign. He pays particular tribute to his colleague, Lady Scotland, for her efforts to ensure that legal aid remained available for more victims of domestic violence than the bill originally covered.

With the removal of funding for social welfare law, Bach is concerned about the future of law centres and Citizens Advice. He laments, “You’ll find that many will close down or take on different forms than they have now”.

Pledging his support, he says: ‘The not-for-profit sector is entitled to do all it can to survive the next few years, until hopefully happier times come again. If that involves them doing things they wouldn’t really want to do, but so they can stay alive and help the people, they will have my personal support”.

Likewise, he recognises the work done by legal aid solicitors in private practice and accepts that the bill will make it hard for some to continue. “It’ll be a crying shame if they find themselves unable to do this work. They too must find ways to survive by cross subsidy or whatever.”

Lord Bach says of himself, “I’m a dangerous person - I’m a convert to social welfare law,” admitting only a ‘negligible’ awareness of social welfare law while he was a practicing barrister himself. “It was only when coming into the job that I realised how crucial it is”.

His epiphany, he says, came after being given “a really hard time” at the Law Centres’ Federation annual meeting in Birmingham. More seriously, he adds, “It was just seeing the kind of work done on really small amounts of legal aid money to change people’s lives. That’s what changed me. After that I was absolutely convinced that if you were going to have a decent legal aid system you need a proper component that looked after civil legal aid”.

Bach says he intended to leave the front bench some time ago, but was determined not to go before this bill made its way through parliament. From now on he says, he hopes to play some part in working with the not for profit sector and with legal aid solicitors, to see how they can survive for the next few years, as well as helping his party build up an enduring social welfare law policy.