Hundreds of legal aid lawyers report failings at Legal Aid Agency

Hundreds of legal aid lawyers have given examples of poor decision making by the Legal Aid Agency (LAA), the body set up by the government to decide which cases receive legal aid funding.

As the Law Gazette reports, in over 400 responses to a survey conducted by the Legal Aid Practitioners Group (LAPG), lawyers gave a sense of the “serious disconnect” between civil servants working at the LAA and the legal profession.

The LAPG’s chief executive, Chris Minnoch, said: “From the examples given to us by members, we’re concerned that LAA caseworkers don’t appear to understand their own rules, make arbitrary or unlawful decisions, sometimes don’t act unless threatened with judicial review, make inconsistent decisions on the same set of facts, and the appeal processes don’t appear to be operating properly. Of course members only tend to contact us when things have gone wrong, so we needed to get a better understanding of the range and extent of the problems.”

The survey remains open until next week, as practitioners try to identify the exact source of the problems at the LAA. Minnoch commented: “We’re trying to work out whether what we see is representative of what is actually happening within the LAA. Is there a resourcing issue or is it a question of LAA caseworker training? Are the regulations fundamentally unworkable? Do providers not understand the rules? Is it combination of these factors? Or is there a deliberate culture of refusal to reduce expenditure and drive providers out of the market?”