25/03/2015
Further to today's bad news, I want to share with you the closing remarks that Richard Miller made at the Law Society's recent Legal Aid Conference:
"These are dark times for access to justice. As Sir Stanley Burnton said so eloquently this morning, access to justice is under attack on numerous fronts. But justice and the rule of law are too important for us to buckle under and give up. We are the torchbearers. For many years, lawyers have shown themselves to be hugely resourceful and innovative. In the 1940s, it was lawyers who got the legal aid system set up in the first place. In the 1970s, it was lawyers who took up the mantle of social welfare law on behalf of the poor and the dispossessed, pushing the boundaries of legal aid to enable them to stand up to unscrupulous landlords and uncaring public authorities. In the 1980s, lawyers pressed for legal aid to be extended to cover advice to suspects in the police station, and it is now so well embedded that it is shocking to think that this was ever not available.
For forty years, we were winning. We had Governments, both Tory and Labour, to whom social justice was an important concern, for whom people mattered more than how you can make numbers dance on a spreadsheet.
But then the pendulum started swinging the other way. Lord Mackay started the attempts to rein in expenditure on legal aid. Then the Access to Justice Act 1999 ruled that instead of justice being made available to everyone who needed it, the State could decide that we cannot afford to give justice to everybody - a truly crass notion.
Throughout the 2000s, we faced a freeze in the overall budget, harsh cuts to fees, and salami-slicing of eligibility, before the mad axemen of LASPO took over in 2010, with the results we all know so well.
I live in hope that the pendulum has now swung as far as it is going to in that direction, and that it will now start swinging back again. We see with the impact on the Courts and the willingness of the judiciary to speak out the wholly counterproductive nature of some of the cuts. The recent reports from the Parliamentary Accounts and Justice committees reinforce the view that the cuts have gone further than Parliament intended, and the injustices are starting to impinge on the public consciousness. Public polling that we did with the Legal Action Group shows public support for cuts to legal aid falling.
On a broader level, we see electoral support for the two main parties falling, with almost a third of the electorate now indicating that they intend to vote for someone offering something different. The appetite for a move away from politics focused on macroeconomics and towards politics focused on people seems to be growing. This gives cause for hope that we may be able to win some of our arguments on the human level, rather than always having to focus just on the economic case for legal aid.
The tendency to innovate remains strong. The challenges of technology outlined by Roger Smith show how the world is changing. Within this new world, we may find new ways of attracting clients, new ways of delivering services, and new roles for ourselves. I hope that our session on digital working helped set the scene of where we are now on this digital journey, and where we may be heading.
Like Colum, I do not believe that technology is going to drive us out. I share his view that what our clients need is a real person providing real human support; and I believe there will be enough people who need that for the foreseeable future for us not to have to worry about being made redundant by machines. Colum also showed one way of innovating from a business perspective. It was a refreshing challenge to the increasingly prevalent belief that legal aid is incompatible with being a successful business. Even if you do not see yourselves as running big firms with private capital investment, hopefully our sessions on practice management, billing, and practice development in the area of advocacy will have given you ideas as to how can enhance your businesses.
The innovation of lawyers to fight for both our clients and the legal aid system itself has also been on display today. Joanna Miles's summary of the novel approaches from the President of the Family Division, opening up new potential streams of funding for lawyers, might leave you considering applications you can make to the Court on behalf of clients of yours. Meanwhile we will continue to support the work of the Public Law Project in trying to push the boundaries of LASPO so that it ends up covering rather more cases than it does on the Government's current very narrow interpretation of the Act.
For the criminal practitioners among you, I would imagine that Colum's description of Government interventions being uncommercial range particularly true. We continue to be faced with chronic uncertainty, which won't be resolved at least until a few months after the General Election. Even with a different Government, we are still likely to be facing challenging times. But in this area in particular, as Ed Cape outlined, international developments may provide us with some tools to help keep the Government in check.
I would like to thank all of our speakers for giving up their time to share their wisdom with us today, and I hope that you feel you have got something of value out of the day.
My closing message to you is to continue to be the torchbearers of access to justice. We know our arguments are right. They make sense from an economic perspective, they are essential in maintaining a society governed by the rule of law rather than by might, and they are unanswerable on a humanitarian basis.
I will finish with a line from the Best Exotic Marigold Hotel. "Everything will be all right in the end. If it's not all right, then it's not yet the end."
It's not yet the end."
