Cuts to legal aid exacerbate two-nation justice

http://www.theguardian.com/law/2015/jun/25/cuts-to-legal-aid-exacerbate-two-nation-justice

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Michael Gove is perfectly correct to deplore a two-nation justice system, one for the rich and another for the poor (Justice system badly failing most users, says Gove, 23 June), but he promulgates just such a system by continuing to cut the provision of legal aid for the poor.

A wealthy person accused of a crime can have access to top-flight counsel and expensive solicitors who practise from ivory towers surrounded by beavering assistants, and can provide the service our courts show as an example to the world. However, for an impecunious person arrested and in a cell, the horror of his situation is overwhelming.

There was a time until the last government, when that person could call upon someone of ability who knew how to advise him, and who could take up his cudgel if necessary.

Mr Gove is doing a disservice to suggest that such facility is available under his regime, far less in the light of his further cuts. The availability through the traditional high-street solicitor, who depended upon his reputation for his work and his income, is just not going to be there. Solicitors and barristers have bills to pay, and when dependant upon legal aid scales they just cannot manage.

It is laughable that organisations not created through years of practice in the law, who have been invited to tender, will be deemed able to provide such a service. Even more laughable that the “wealthy firms” and City lawyers will drop their vast fee-earning practice to help their less well-heeled brethren. Mr Gove, with no experience of how the law works, does not appreciate how busily engaged they are in paying the rent for those ivory towers. There is a vast difference between them and the legal aid lawyer, who spends time in the cells with his client, needs to hang around the courts for the case to be called, is frustrated by the prosecution not being ready, or the courts not having the time to hear the case that day and, by Mr Gove’s direction, will earn a pittance.

Pro bono did not seem to apply when MPs were offered a salary increase, nor indeed for the civil servant who will control legal aid. By all means improve the way in which courts work, but please, Mr Gove, do not say that the poor will have access to justice when your proposals clearly deny this. His Honour Barrington Black London

• In 1981, when I was a legal housing adviser for Brighton Housing Trust, I had to attend a session at Lewes court. In a hearing before mine, a farmer’s labourer and his family were being evicted from their cottage. The man had walked 12 miles to court, after a neighbour had read the summons to him. Afterwards I stopped him and asked whether he had understood that he would have to leave and why. It turned out that he didn’t have any understanding of what had happened. I told him I would help him to appeal (which, some weeks later, we did successfully).

Back in my office, I did some research and found that 80% of housing cases were won by landlords, 20% by tenants. For sure, housing law was much more complex then than it is now, and there were few solicitors who showed a specialist interest in this non-lucrative area of law.

I decided we needed to provide a free court service, where trained volunteers would help people like our farm worker. Less than a year later the statistics in the Brighton courts had turned: 80% of tenants now won their case. Justice for the poor was becoming a reality and gradually we employed highly trained advisers, and were funded by legal aid.

The Legal Aid and Advice Act, set up by the Attlee government in 1949, played an enormous role in supporting the rights of those too poor to afford private legal advice, even though even in the early 1980s most solicitors didn’t offer it to tenants in cases against their landlords. Lately, of course, legal aid has been steadily eroded.

Now we hear Michael Gove saying that: “There are two nations in our justice system at present. On the one hand, the wealthy, international class who can choose to settle cases in London with the gold standard of British justice. And then everyone else, who has to put up with a creaking, outdated system to see justice done in their own lives.” Yes, Mr Gove, true enough, aided and abetted by the cuts in legal aid by your government. Yet you are “not indicating a U-turn on past legal aid cuts” as a potential starting point . Wouldn’t that make sense?Jenny BackwellHove, East Sussex