Public Affairs
FNF submission to Justice Committee inquiry into the Future of Legal Aid
- Details
- Published: Thursday, 17 December 2020 14:39
You can now download our submission to Justice Committee inquiry into the Future of Legal Aid which was published on the 19th of November 2020.
The Justice Committee has conducted an inquiry into the future of legal aid. The legal aid system in England and Wales was fundamentally changed by the Legal Aid, Sentencing and Punishment of Offenders Act 2012 (LASPO). Since then there have been a number of legislative changes and post-legislative reviews of LASPO. The Justice Committee examined the changes to civil legal aid in 2014 and the changes to criminal legal aid in 2018. This inquiry aims to look ahead to the future of legal aid, to identify the major challenges facing clients and providers and how they might be tackled. The inquiry is especially keen to hear about the sustainability of the legal aid market, the impact of Covid-19 and the increasing reliance on digital technology to deliver legal advice and court services.
The inquiry specifically asks:
1. How LASPO has impacted access to justice and for views on the post-implementation review and the criminal legal aid review;
2. The role of the Legal Aid Agency;
3. Recruitment and retention problems among legal aid professionals;
4. The impact of the court reform programme and the increasing use of technology on legal aid services and clients;
5. The impact of Covid-19 on legal aid services and clients;
6. What the challenges are for legal aid over the next decade, what reforms are needed and what can be learnt from elsewhere.
Our focus in this submission is on private law in relation to points 1, and 6 and to a modest extent point 5.
We summarised that the impact of LASPO in private family law Children Act proceedings, has been:
- the near collapse of family mediation (in significant part due to growth in domestic abuse allegations and abuse of the system designed to protect the vulnerable)
- to widen the imbalance of access to justice between complainants and respondents to allegations of domestic abuse
- a substantial increase in the number of litigants in person and in the total number of cases as well
- a degradation of justice for children in private law proceedings
- to substantially increase family conflict.
Amongst our recommendations we proposed:
- that it is never appropriate to restrict legal aid eligibility to just one party – the need for an ‘equality of arms’
- that legal aid granted on the basis of allegations is withdrawn once allegations are determined by the court to have been unfounded or irrelevant
- that measures designed to protect alleged victims must be designed to also protect alleged perpetrators, and their children as many typically prove to be innocent and the allegations unfounded
- that an Early Intervention Pathway is adopted, with Finding of Fact hearings taking place within weeks, before child-parent relationships are damaged.
Please contact your MP and share your experience of the issues being investigated by this Committee, urging them to make representations to the relevant Ministers. If you want to find out who your MP is, please click here. Feel free to share any responses you receive with us at admin@fnf.org.uk
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