England: Law Society condemns plans to slash legal aid by £30m

The cuts come less than a month after the MoJ published proposals that will see QCs’ fees rise by 10 per cent “at the expense of other criminal advocates”.

Under the new plans, the MoJ will reduce payments to advocates appointed by the court to cross-examine alleged victims of abuse from private rates to legal aid rates, and will make changes to the Litigators Graduated Fee Scheme (LGFS) which will slash payments for paper-heavy Crown Court cases. The reason given for this latter change is that more pages of evidence are now being served by the CPS, and therefore average costs per case are increasing.

James Parry, chair of the Law Society’s criminal legal aid committee said: “These cuts are unnecessary and ill-timed, given the long term project to reform the litigator fee scheme, which will ultimately remove reliance on the pages of evidence which are creating this problem. The society will be working with the MoJ on this longer term project and we believe that it is unwise to impose short-term cuts on the scheme before that project has even started.”

The Law Society commissioned Oxford Economics to follow up its 2014 report looking at trends in legal aid expenditure. Their new report demonstrates that the MoJ is on track to make further savings in the criminal legal aid budget without any further cuts to rates.

“The Ministry has extensive independent evidence from consultants* that demonstrates that solicitors’ businesses cannot afford to absorb further cuts, and there is a substantial risk that these cuts will drive a significant number of firms into insolvency,” said Mr Parry.

“The firms most likely to bear the brunt of these cuts are the larger firms on whom the government depends to deliver a criminal defence service. The result could be that the government fails to meet its statutory obligations to ensure everyone accused of a crime has representation where required - a fundamental aspect of the rule of law and rights of citizens.”