.
Impact of legal aid changes on children revealed
This column documents evidence of the effect of the Legal Aid, Sentencing and Punishment of Offenders (LASPO) Act 2012. Readers are invited to send in relevant information for publication. Submissions of up to 500 words will be published in full and, on request, anonymised. E-mail: fbawdon@lag.org.uk using the message title ‘Legal aid cuts impact statement’. The first in-depth examination of the impact of the April 2013 legal aid changes on children was published last month by the Office of the Children’s Commissioner for England in a ‘child rights impact assessment’. The research included interviews with children and young people, desk-based research and legal analysis. Key findings on the changes include the following:
Although ‘exceptional funding’ was meant to be available in cases where failure to fund could infringe the applicant’s rights under the Human Rights Act 1998 or under EU law, in practice this requires complex preparatory work, impractical for a child without a solicitor.
•Only 57 cases were granted exceptional funding compared with the 3,700 the Ministry of Justice expected.
•In the family courts, the number of private cases:
■where both parties were represented fell from 46 per cent to 30 per cent;
■where neither party was represented rose from 12 per cent to 22 per cent;
■where one party was unrepresented rose from 42 per cent to 48 per cent.
Dr Maggie Atkinson, Children's Commissioner for England, said: ‘The human cost of Legal Aid reforms is clearly immense. Behind the evidence in our research are countless heart rending stories of children and vulnerable young adults whose lives have been seriously affected by their inability to access legal representation. This means, in effect, that they cannot seek, let alone receive, justice.’