A raft of secondary legislation has been going through parliament in recent weeks to implement the Legal Aid, Sentencing and Punishment of Offenders (LASPO) Act. Yesterday, the last day the House of Lords was sitting before the Easter break, the final orders and regulations to implement the changes to legal aid were approved by parliament. The Labour Opposition and crossbench peers protested about the changes to civil legal aid to the end, and inflicted three further defeats on the government.

 

Lord Bach, the former legal aid minister and Labour Party peer, proposed a motion on welfare benefits advice and the government’s failure to make good its promise at an earlier stage of the legislation to introduce legal aid in complex benefits cases. The crossbench peer Baroness Grey-Thompson’s motion was on her concerns over the compulsory telephone gateway which she believes fails 'to deliver sufficiently wide access to legal aid services for disabled persons'. The third motion was proposed by the former Attorney-General, Baroness Scotland, who is a Labour peer. Baroness Scotland warned that the regulations on qualifying for legal aid in domestic violence cases are too restrictive and would lead to domestic violence victims being 'exposed to an increased risk of injury and death'.

 

The three motions are what are known as regret motions and while they were approved by the Lords they cannot force the government to amend the legislation. Regret motions do sometimes persuade governments to change legislation and have been relied on to support judicial review applications.

 After the successful votes Lord Bach told LAG: 'With only five days to go before the LASPO Act is implemented we were really fighting against this legislation until the very end. While these regret motions do not force the government to change anything, they have further tarnished its reputation and show that the Lords were deeply unhappy about this legislation.'

 

The rather shabby and chaotic way in which the secondary legislation has been rushed through at the last minute is going to lead to difficulties in the coming weeks for practitioners. At the time of writing (27 March), there were still the amendments to the criminal legal aid specification and very high cost cases payment rates to be published. LAG is publishing its Legal Aid Handbook 2013/14 in an electronic version next week and will ensure the last minute changes to the rules governing legal aid are covered in the final print and further electronic versions of the book.

 

LAG is most concerned about the impact the changes in the scope of civil legal aid will have on the public. From 1 April, over 600,000 people will be denied help with common civil legal problems. The following table breaks down the impact of the changes (the figures are taken from the government’s own assessment which was published in June last year):

 

Family: 232,500

Debt: 105,050

Education: 2,870

Employment: 24,070

Housing: 53,200

Welfare Benefits: 135,000

Immigration: 53,290

Other: 17,020

Total cases: 623,000

 

Perhaps more damning are the government's equality impact assessments. These outline in stark detail that it is the groups which are protected by equality legislation - women, disabled people and black and ethnic minority communities - which will suffer most from the reduction in civil legal aid. These cuts will lead to great injustice and human misery. They cannot be allowed to stand. The fight to overturn them must continue.