04.11.25 Thought Piece by Antony Geddes on the CLSA Response to Legal Aid Proposals
Most people don’t realise that if they are unfortunate enough to find themselves being arrested, they will always have access to legal representation at the police station, 365 days a year 24/7 and free of charge. That legal representative may have to leave their family during Xmas Day lunch to help you out. They are paid a fixed fee regardless of time of day and distance from police station, or whether they are there helping you for 5 minutes or 5 hours. The fee is fixed by the legal aid agency and remains static year on year with no inflationary uplift…Unlike the justice secretary who is apparently looking at a 2.8% increase next year according to the IPSA.
The Government recently conducted the consultation on legal aid fee, which suggest some new slightly higher, yet static rates. Now they are reviewing the results on the consultation (so they are now talking about us talking about it!). Lord knows when the results of that will be released but no doubt just in time for the autumn budget just in time for the chancellor to make another u-turn and hack the suggested fees down a little. In the meantime the legal aid portal remains down following a cyber attack and law firms now have to do the job of the legal aid agency, just to get paid on top of the work they were already doing to represent their clients.
There is some media interest in the Crown Court backlog and rightly so, but all those cases started life at the police station covered by a solicitor or qualified police station rep and 90% of criminal cases where someone is charged still ends in the magistrates court, with duty solicitors taking on the lions share of that…again on a flat daily rate, regardless of how many clients they see that day. Duty solicitors don’t have a union and can’t hold the government to account. They just have to hope that one day a government will stop talking about things and actually do something. Junior Doctors and train drivers are vital to the country and arguably are underpaid and under appreciated, but they do get pay increases year on year and strike if they don’t. If criminal defence solicitors went on strike the impact on the criminal justice system would be massive for defendants and victims of crime. We recognise the impact of crime on society, its headline news every day, yet the investment in the justice system remains shocking. Any ‘quick’ cash injection for the year is welcome but the review must consider annual increases in line with inflation.
The Law Society hashtag#CLSA Solicitors Regulation Authority The Legal Aid Agency
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