HAMLYN - College of Social Sciences and International Studies ...

Justice and Access to Justice
funded which previously were not. But where are those cases
and by what methods are they going to be found? One method
is simply to extend funding to new categories of work previously
excluded from legal aid. The Lord Chancellor's very
welcome recent decision to extend funding to representation
before the immigration appellate authorities is an example. But
one imagines there will be few such block extensions.
It has been estimated that the Government's decision to
withdraw legal aid from certain categories of work, notably
personal injury cases, will save some £35 million. 24 Even in the
unlikely event that all that money were allocated to legal
services for priority cases, actually getting such cases so that
they can be funded is quite a different matter. Moreover, could
one rustle up larger numbers of "priority" legal problems
without at the same time getting people to come forward in
numbers with non-priority legal problems? Quite apart from
those practical questions, there is also the question of principle
whether taxpayer's money should be used actively to drum up
legal work. If that is not the intention I doubt whether the
additional moneys notionally allocated to priority cases will in
fact be used. A cynic might suggest that that is precisely what
the Government hopes will happen.
One major uncertainty amongst many is the extent to which
the budget for civil work is at risk of being diminished by the
claims of the budget for criminal cases. The Government has
taken the point that capping the budget for criminal legal aid
would be a breach of the European Convention on Human
Rights, Article 6 of which guarantees free representation for
those who cannot afford to pay for legal assistance. But there
has not as yet been a guarantee of ring-fencing for the civil
budget and some of the parliamentary, statements on the subject
made by ministers during the passage of the Bill were distinctly
worrying. During the House of Lords Committee stage, for
instance, the Lord Chancellor said, "The only money that is left
24 The savings from announced categories of exclusion from legal aid were
calculated as £41 million of which £36 million was due to personal injury
cases. £5 million should be deducted from this on account of loss of retained
contributions and receipts from the statutory charge. (P. Pleasence et al.,
Testing the Code, The Funding Code-Final Research Report, October 1999, Fig.
53, p. 36.)
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