On Wednesday the 18th March 2015 the Legal Aid Practitioners Group (LAPG) attended the Houses of Parliament where they launched their manifesto for Legal Aid.
The carefully thought out manifesto calls upon the government to review the impact of the Legal Aid Sentencing and Punishment of offenders Act 2012 (LASPO), which has impacted access to justice significantly since coming into force in April 2013.
The 15th June this year is the 800th anniversary of the Magna Carta, the document that gave us all the right to justice. One may therefore question why in 2015 access to justice is not available to all sectors of society.
The manifesto for Legal Aid urges the government to introduce a legal aid system that secures equality of arms between the rich and the poor. The thorough document calls for the government to immediately review the areas of law LASPO removed from scope, in particular for the most vulnerable in society such as children, victims of domestic violence, slavery and trafficking.
Further, the government are recommended to abandon the ‘residence test’ which has been found by the Courts to be unlawful, but if successfully appealed will put those in urgent need such as victims of trafficking with no access to justice.
Many took to social media to show their support for the Group’s actions and stressed the importance of access to legal aid in domestic abuse cases. Two women are murdered by their partners each week, costing the state £1m which is enough money to provide for 2,000+ domestic abuse injunctions.
The manifesto goes on to highlight that the safety net of Section 10; exceptional case funding, is not operating in the way Parliament intended, and as a result cases that should have been granted funding, have not been. The Group recommends that the government endorses the decision of the Court in Gudanaviciene v Director of Legal Aid Casework and Others [2014] A11 ER (D) 123 where it was held that the exceptional funding scheme was unlawful, and replace the scheme with a genuine safety net.
The manifesto also looks at the mandatory telephone gateway where clients are not permitted to approach a legal advisor directly, but can only access legal advice through a mandatory call centre for certain areas of law. It is proposed that such scheme is scrapped in favour of one where clients have the flexibility of telephone and face to face advice.
The Legal Aid Practitioners Group has done a fantastic job in producing an excellent manifesto with practical solutions to our currently unjust legal aid system. The final page of the document closes with an appropriate quote of the Magna Carta 1215 ‘We will sell to no man, we will not deny or defer to any man either justice or right’.