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This year marks the 60th anniversary of the Legal Aid and Advice Act, but how successful is the system in providing state-funded help to those in need?
This year marks the 60th anniversary of the Legal Aid and Advice Act 1949, which sought to establish our legal aid system as a cornerstone of the welfare state. The idea was that everyone would have equal access to proper legal advice in the same way that they would have access to free healthcare and a decent education.
But with funding for legal aid being drastically cut, where can you go for advice and what kind of help can you expect? Do you have a right to state-funded help to assist you in preparing your case, or for a lawyer to represent you in court or before a tribunal? And how will the courts treat you?
The justice gap aims to answer those questions by building a profile of the legal system as experienced by the general public. Over the next year the Guardian will interview people who are using citizens advice, law centres, community centres and court buildings up and down the land.
We will highlight parts of the justice system hidden from public scrutiny, but which have a huge impact on people's lives, including the family and coroners' courts through to parole board hearings in prisons.
The project will be based on research conducted in the next 12 months by the charity Legal Action Group for its Access to Justice Audit.
The courtroom is often the place where ordinary people meet the impersonal forces of bureaucracy for the first time, especially when they find themselves victims of a failing economy. If you have fallen behind on your mortgage and your bank starts repossession proceedings (as happened to 150,000 homeowners last year), the decision as to whether you keep the roof over your head takes place in a county court. If you are one of the 40,000 people who lose their job every month and want to challenge the fairness of that decision, you will end up in front of a judge sitting in an employment tribunal.
"Legal aid should be available in those types of case in which lawyers normally represented private individual clients," said Lord Rushcliffe in his 1945 report, which was a precursor to the act. Public funding should not be limited to those people "normally classed as poor", he argued, but should include those of "small or moderate means".
Falling eligibility
So, how do we measure up to that aspiration six decades later? Not well. According to the Ministry of Justice only 29% of us are eligible for publicly-funded advice under the legal aid scheme.
The government spends £2bn of taxpayers' money a year on publicly funded legal advice. That sum represents, as government ministers have been quick to point out, a greater per capita spend on legal aid than anywhere else in the world. It is a significant investment. But it wouldn't keep the NHS going for a fortnight. It is a fixed figure stretched to provide advice on housing, employment, family and all the other areas of help that are so desperately needed in a recession.
It also provides legal aid for those accused of crime. Labour – famously "tough on crime and tough on the causes of crime" – has introduced more than 3,000 criminal offences during its term in office, the cost of which has eaten into the legal aid budget.
The justice gap will follow the increasing number of people not poor enough to qualify for legal aid but not rich enough to afford a lawyer. In the first video, you can see Jacqui O'Carroll, legal services manager at Shepway citizens advice bureau, talking about the problems homeowners with mortgage arrears face in court.
O'Carroll's helpdesk at Dover county court is a lifeline for many homeowners. The people she sees in court are often resigned to losing their homes, ill-informed about any rights they might have, or misled as to what their rights might be by their lenders. The reality is that in 21st-century Britain it is all too easy to lose your home because you have not had access to decent advice.
We are interested in hearing about your experiences. You can contact the justice gap via jrobins@lag.org.uk
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