Dean Parnell: The legal aid bombshell
Sep 3 2010 By Dean Parnell
Legal Aid is a fundamental cornerstone of our society, as it allows those people on limited incomes access to justice. Around two million people every year benefit from Legal Aid, in a wide variety of cases.
Earlier this year the Legal Services Commission, which administers the Legal Aid budget for England and Wales, started a competitive tendering process in which Legal Aid firms were required to take part if they wished to carry on doing legally aided work. This process applied to crime, mental health, immigration, family and social welfare.
The results of this have been of particular concern to Birmingham Law Society. In terms of the most recent tenders results, there has been a 30 per cent reduction in the number of firms permitted to undertake legally aided social welfare work. Even more shocking is the reduction of 46 per cent of law firms being permitted to undertake family legally aided work. This means a staggering 1,100 law firms have been told they can no longer do family legal aid work within a matter of weeks.
Last week I sent a letter out to Birmingham Law Society members asking those involved in the family legal aid tenders to contact us and tell us their story. These results have been fed back to the Law Society. It is clear that the Law Society shares our concerns and I am aware that they have now commenced court action over the tendering process.
I am not against the principle of tendering for Legal Aid work and I do think there are many excellent firms who have been awarded contracts. However, there are some very negative consequences attached to such a high number of organisations being declined new contracts.
Quite apart from the financial implications within our region e.g. redundancies and closure of law firms (or business activities) and the disruption to existing legally aided clients, the greatest impact will be on society’s most vulnerable.
With some regional centres seeing such a huge reduction of firms being permitted to carry out legal aid work, people will find it more difficult to find local law firms who do legal aid and in many cases people will have to travel many miles to get legal representation. That presents a serious problem for those people on limited incomes and the entire basis upon which legal aid was founded “access to justice for society’s most vulnerable” is now under threat.
* Dean Parnell is president of Birmingham Law Society.
