Legal Aid
since the tightening of legislation in 2013, which also introduced an Interests of Justice (IoJ) test which made legal aid far more inaccessible than ever before by practically writing off anyone with previous convictions. While the government has stated that these rules can be bent where mitigating circumstances apply, it is plain that the consolidation and tightening of legislation regarding legal aid has made it extremely difficult for both plaintiffs and defendants in civil and criminal cases to achieve financial support, and this has of course had its many consequences which have led to justice being equally inaccessible. One other way to assess the declining availability of legal aid is to consider litigants in person (LIPs). According to the Courts and Tribunals Judiciary, 13 a litigant in person is an ‘individual, company or organization who has to go to court without legal representation from a solicitor or barrister’. As published by the National Audit Office, 14 or NAO, since April 2013, statistics show that there has been a 30% increase in the number of plaintiffs representing themselves in all family court cases, one important aspect of civil law. While there is no question as to whether this is correlated to the LASPO Act, questions have arisen as to whether the rise of litigants in person has affected the justice system negatively. An article published by transform justice 15 stated that, as a result of legal aid cuts, many have opted to defend themselves instead of choosing to hire a private lawyer, who may charge fees of up to ten times as much as legal aid, and as a result we see ‘unrepresented defendants not understanding what they were charged with, pleading guilty when they would have been advised not to, and vice versa, messing up the cross-examination of the witness, and getting tougher sentences because they did not know how to mitigate’. Thackray Williams Solicitors published a topical article 16 which suggested that ‘there have been a number of recent cases showing that Courts will have less tolerance to non-compliance with the rules’, for example, in the case ‘Hobson v West London Law Solicitors’, the High Court made a claim against Hobson, a litigant in person, because he failed to comply with ‘the court rules’ which doubtlessly would have been set out to him by a professional advocate. Both of these articles have highlighted problems which tend to revolve around a lack of legal ‘knowhow’, all of which have, of course, led to a failure to serve justice to those who have appeared unrepresented in court. To expect the average citizen to understand complex legal procedures and to be able to argue an appeal case is absurd, and although the government has refused to reveal the results of research on the conviction rate of litigants in person, it is supposedly common knowledge within the courtrooms that they are far higher than those of defendants with legal representation, thereby indicating a failure of the U.K legal system to deliver justice to these LIPs. That the government is failing to address an issue which is removing the liberties of some of society’s most vulnerable people is quite appalling, yet not at all surprising. However, what does come as a surprise is that the legal system has not made an effort to reduce the number of LIPs, given their costly impact on the court. A litigant-in- person is unlikely to understand court proceedings, and therefore it is likely that proceedings will be lengthened, thus running up a much higher cost for the justice system, which could have been avoided if the defendant were provided a lawyer at inexpensive legal aid rates. There is, therefore, conclusive evidence that by prohibiting the average defendant from accessing legal aid, these defendants are more likely to fight their case unrepresented, usually lengthening the court proceedings. The government ’ s reform of legal aid, aimed at cutting costs, has instead increased them. More important than that, though, is decreasing access to justice of many poorer defendants.
Following strict legislation imposed by the LASPO act, those once deserving recipients of legal aid receipts are now struck with two alternatives to the evidently flawed possibility of representing themselves in court, both of which are evidently not viable and do not match up to the ideals of justice
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