Legal Aid reform is controversial but necessary

Since Margaret Thatcher arrived in Downing Street, almost every administration has insisted that the Legal Aid budget has ballooned out of control, and vowed to cut it back. Not one has succeeded: instead, it has expanded relentlessly, to the point where it absorbs £2 billion of taxpayers’ money every year.

As we report exclusively today, the Coalition is determined to succeed where its predecessors failed. Prompted by its stringent budget settlement, the Ministry of Justice is planning a series of unprecedented cuts to Legal Aid. These include eliminating it for whole areas of civil litigation, such as divorce cases, medical malpractice, employment tribunals, personal injury cases, and immigration appeals. Furthermore, the eligibility criteria will be narrowed. At the moment, if you have assets, other than your house, of more than £3,000, you cannot get full legal aid. That will be lowered to £1,000 – and for the first time, the value of your home will be taken into account. In short, while Legal Aid for criminal cases will remain untouched under the proposals, Legal Aid for civil cases will all but disappear, with an expected saving of at least £300 million.

Will the Coalition be able to put such radical plans into practice? The reaction from the legal profession will be hysterical. The livelihoods of thousands of lawyers will be affected, and ministers can expect a deluge of criticism that the reforms “deny justice” to millions of deserving people. That is the line that has been used to counter every previous attempt to reform the system – and it has been successful partly because it is not without some merit. It is inevitable that, in tightening up eligibility, and in denying legal aid in civil litigation, people who would have brought cases will now be unable to do so.

Yet these reforms are still welcome, and not just because they provide evidence of the Coalition’s willingness to use the deficit crisis as an opportunity to rethink the state’s role, rather than simply to slash budgets. There are strong reasons to believe that diminishing the amount of litigation will, overall, be of benefit to society. For example: one of the most significant expenditures the NHS faces is not drugs, or doctors’ salaries, but the cost of defending, and paying out on, thousands of medical malpractice suits. There is little evidence that this legal pressure improves the quality of medical care: if anything, it reduces it, by diminishing the amount of time and money that can be devoted to treatment. Similarly, cutting out Legal Aid from divorce cases will make couples whose marriages have broken down less likely to resort to the courts. And immigration law will surely be improved by curtailing the endless appeals that the system presently makes possible.

There will inevitably have to be exceptions written in to the Coalition’s proposals, both out of compassion and to comply with the Human Rights Act. The test will be whether the Government resists the temptation to satisfy lawyers and other special interests, and make those exceptions so large that they undermine the reforms as a whole. The Coalition has already demonstrated that it has courage and commitment. It will need those virtues in abundance if it is to succeed in resolving this decades-old problem.