Justice secretary David Lidington hints that inequality before the law set to continue due to lack of political will to increase legal aid availability
updated on 27 October 2017
Promises to publish a review of the impact of legal aid cuts by Justice Secretary David Lidington have done little to raise the spirits of practitioners following the government’s latest fees decision, which slashed the amount of evidence that lawyers are paid to consider in legal aid cases.
Addressing the House of Common’s justice committee, Lidington said he accepted responsibility for the decision to cut the number of claimable pages of evidence in prosecution cases from 10,000 to 6,000, although he insisted that legal aid lawyers will still be paid based on the number of hours required to work on each case. He also promised to publish a review into the effect of the Legal Aid, Sentencing and Punishment of Offenders Act in the “very near future”, but dampened any expectations of positive change - which has been called for from all quarters of the legal profession - due to the government's reluctance to seek ways of increasing departmental budgets.
Employment lawyers encouraged by the Supreme Court’s ruling that the government acted unlawfully by charging people to access employment tribunals were also brought down to earth. The Law Gazette reports that Lidington defended the fees regime as a way of cutting government spending on tribunals and pointedly refused to rule out reintroducing fees in the future.
