On 15 November, Justice Secretary Ken Clarke announced big cuts to legal aid.  Funding will be axed for a wide range of disputes, including divorce, employment and debt.  The government aims to cut the legal aid bill by £350m by 2015, resulting in 500,000 fewer civil cases.  Under the new system, anyone with disposable assets more than £1,000 will have to pay at least £100 towards their legal costs.  

Responding to these proposals, Labour’s Shadow Justice Secretary, Sadiq Khan, said the test should be whether the proposals “would deliver a saving to the public purse while ensuring that no one is denied access to justice regardless of their means.”  Will it make it harder for people on modest incomes to obtain justice?

It is proposed that legal aid will no longer be provided for welfare benefit cases, because these are “of lower objective importance”.  The white paper argues that “help and advice is available from a number of other sources”, including voluntary sector agencies.  But the problem is that legal aid is a main source of funding for these agencies – and the white paper says this funding will be scrapped.

In Newham, the main source of welfare advice is at Community Links.  Their advice service has been running for 30 years and helped 9000 people last year.  It has eight full time advisers.  All of them are paid for by legal aid.  The Government’s proposals would force that service to close.  Community Links suggested I should invite the Minister responsible, Jonathan Djanogly, to visit them and see the service in action.  I am pleased he has accepted and is due to visit next month.

Elsewhere, Citizens Advice Bureaux are the main source of advice.  It cost £102 million to run the country’s CABs last year, and £25 million came from legal aid.  £60 million came from local councils.  That funding is at risk from the swingeing cuts to local authority grants.  The remaining £17 million came from the financial advice fund introduced by the last Government – and nobody knows yet if the new Government will maintain it.  

So the Government expects the voluntary sector to provide an alternative to legal aid, but Government policies threaten much of the advice work the voluntary sector provides today.  When I pressed Mr Djanogly on this, he said that funding of welfare advice services was being considered as a cross-Government issue – which at least keeps alive the possibility that replacement funding might be found from somewhere.

Looking at legal aid more broadly, the courts are for people to seek justice when they have been wronged according to the law.  Sweeping cuts to legal aid risk taking the hope of justice away from many on modest incomes.  They are a particular worry for the most vulnerable – people with mental health problems, victims of domestic violence, people who are unemployed.  If the Tory-led government is serious about creating a ‘big society’ they will need to think long and hard before going ahead with these proposals