For once the Guardian has a comment piece, by Madeleine Bunting, that tells it like it actually is for the thousands upon thousands of low paid and badly-treated people condemned to live their daily lives in quiet and increasingly panicky desperation as a result of New Labour’s complete capitulation to the corpocracy and their wilful destruction of access to free or low cost legal services:
The months of sitting on the commission listening to people’s accounts of their working lives and to those who tried to offer advice when things went wrong provided a glimpse of what an obstacle course it is when you’re poor. It’s not always the lack of material resources that cuts deepest, but the lack of power and the absence of options. When you’re sacked or when you don’t get the sick pay or holiday pay you are owed, how do you fight back? How do you find the employment adviser to help or the courage to stand up to an employer and the sheer guts to take a case to an employment tribunal with no legal aid or a lawyer to help you? The answer is that more often you don’t, you can’t – and that’s how you get trapped in bad jobs.
Poor pay is inextricably bound up with a culture of institutional negligence: no one ensures workers know their rights or how to find out about them; a myriad of enforcement agencies with tiny budgets confuse everyone, and the legal system to arbitrate on abuse is slow and inaccessible. While the government has consulted and dithered, low-paid, insecure work has flourished like some rapacious mould. The face-to-face legal advisers (which the most vulnerable are known to find easier to deal with) have been axed and replaced with cheap websites and telephone helplines (but how do you know about them?). English language lessons have been cut. While millions of pounds are devoted to advertising for benefit fraud, the amount allocated to advertise the national minimum wage was, until a recent increase, a sixth of that spent on a government campaign urging people to use tissues when they sneeze.
I was one of those face to face advisors for a long time and immediately post Labour’s landslide in ’97 a government packed with provincial solicitors and honourable members of the Bar began to deliberately dismantle the already precarious network of community legal services and advice agencies with the imposition of the cost cutting, bureaucratising and horribly complicated legal services contract scheme.
It was dressed up to look like a bonanza in funding for the voluntary sector and a boon for the regularisation of patchy legal services – but it soon became clear that the aim was to control, divide and demolish opposition to corporate law firms while eliminating several campaigning thorns in the side of government as a happy side-effect.
Put broadly, advice services mostly staffed by volunteers were now to compete with high street practitioners and big professional law practices – and each other – for legal aid funding, despite the imbalance in staffing and resources. Advice agencies staffed by volunteers with already shaky finances could not even begin to put a legal aid bid together, but other funding streams from other national and local schemes were gradually turned off; after all, there was a proper scheme now, apply to that.
But even if you could jump through the hoops required under the contract scheme legal aid cash itself was strictly cut back, with, in some instances, an 80% chance of success being required by the Board before allowing more than a standard hour’s funding. (When I left it was about 42 pounds an hour on a case, out of which had to come all and any overheads including admin and support staff and all the on-cost that employing paid staff implies.) Any lawyer or advice worker knows it can take an hour just to get someone to open up to you, let alone assess the evidence or take a statement and especially not to estimate the chances of success; how many potentially winnable cases, with say a 50 or 60% chance of succeeding on the first hour’s investigation, have failed at that very first hurdle?
I was one of the first law graduates to leave university with a student loan and it’s still a millstone round my neck. I had a place to go the Bar but couldn’t take it. A Tory government and the banks between them made sure working class women with children had as many obstacles as possible put in their way. A loans or grant for necessary professional training? How dare you, silly woman.
I had to watch and grit my teeth as my dozy friend with the well off parents in the home counties funded her long party through bar school and arrange a cushy pupillage for her in a relative’s chambers, despite her emotional instability and worrying drug use. No millstones round the neck for her.
I also watched as another friend, academically talented and with better results lose out on a Phd scholarship because the head of department and the other candidate had both been in the navy and knew the same people. I somehow suspect that she was black, working class and female had something to do with it too… which is why we worked for a Labour victory in ’97, despite clause IV and Tony Blair. We thought they’d be different. Listen to my hollow laughing.
But now it’s even worse for anyone who is at all interested either in becoming a lawyer and working in public interest law. You can either work fulltime in another job while studying fulltime, and almost kill yourself, or you can burden yourself with an amount of debt that will cripple you forever unless you can snag a place in a corporate law firm and again, half-kill yourself writing boilerplate contracts and doing some spotty senior partner’s nephew’s bidding for twenty-five years to pay it off.
Legal education is about much more than just educating lawyers, though – it’s about making information about the law available to the widest number of people so as to aid democracy. Rights and responsibilities, innit? An informed populace is an empowered and involved populace, yeah?
Isn’t that just one of Labour’s multifarious core values? Well no, not exactly:
A 62-year-old man from Merthyr Tydfil, south Wales, on income support and facing eviction from his home of 50 years, was forced repeatedly to travel by public transport to west London to find a lawyer to advise him on legal aid.
His story came to light as a coalition of groups that provide legal and social welfare advice prepared to highlight the legal aid ‘desertification’ of England and Wales in the run-up to the introduction of the biggest reforms of public funding in more than 50 years.
A survey of law centres throughout the country by the Law Centre Federation, undertaken for Independent Lawyer magazine, has revealed the extent of the problem. It found that:
· Nine out of 10 centres regularly turned away clients eligible for legal aid;
· Seven reported that their ability to offer access to legal advice was deteriorating;
· One noted an alarming trend of violence towards staff;
· Seven identified specific gaps in provision where, for example, there was no publicly funded employment, housing or immigration advice in their area; and
· Three law centres reported problems finding help for victims of domestic violence.
‘The survey is a snapshot of what’s happening in the areas law centres serve,’ says Steve Hynes, director of the Law Centres Federation. ‘While we acknowledge that demand has always outstripped supply for civil legal services, there is a strong perception that things are getting worse. If the reforms are implemented as proposed, we will quickly see further fraying at the edges.’.
The negligence is deliberate. Should citizens, empowered by knowing what their rights are and how to enforce them, start to challenge the boss, who knows where it might lead? Why, such an informed populace migjht start enforcing their rights on other things too. They might even start to challenge the everyday petty tyrannies of Labour’s incompetent and authoritarian government, like, say, the deaths of children in custody or the illegal invasions of other sovereign nations or the selective imposition of swingeing terrorist legislation on people of a certain ethnicity and/or religion. Hence the policy of dismantling community legal services and access to civil justice, and don’t get me started on the deliberate destruction of criminal legal aid.
Sweeping changes to the legal aid system are going to mean that thousands who find themselves dragged into the legal system are going to find themselves without proper legal advice. Despite the fact that this government has created 6,000 new criminal offences in the last ten years, and is hauling record numbers before the courts and off to chokey, they’re now keen to restrict access to legal advice. All in the name of cost-cutting and reducing ‘inefficiency’ of course. What is actually happening is a massive erosion of hard won rights and the end of the legal aid system, which helped achieve some degree of parity in court cases. (OK, so SchNEWS is obviously against ‘the system’, man, but meantime still not keen to see what few civil liberties we have taken away!)
The changes came in on January 14th. Prior to this, on arrival at the police station you would be offered contact with a solicitor of your choice. From now on you will be directed to the Criminal Defence Call Centre (CDCC). This is staffed, not by solicitors but by ‘accredited’ representatives who’ve done a training course – many of them actually ex-coppers. You will only be allowed to contact your ‘own’ solicitor if you pay privately. Needless to say the call centre advice is probably going to be different to that of a specialist defence solicitor.
One Brighton-based solicitor told SchNEWS, “Previously we could intervene in the process earlier – warn people to make no comment, not to sign police notebooks and not to answer any questions off the PNC1 form*. We could act as an outside guarantee of people’s rights while they were inside”. Now, “the system is in meltdown.” If the call centre is too incompetent to get hold of your brief then you may end up using a duty solicitor or remaining unrepresented. If you’re not going to be interviewed then you can be fingerprinted, DNAed and booted out of the door without once receiving any independent advice.
Keep ’em ignorant, keep ’em quiet.
Now a new set of legal aid reforms has been published by Justice Minister Jack Straw and on first glance it looks like bad news for those still doggedly fighting away trying to protect the rights of ordinary people. Injustice – it’s not a bug, it’s a feature.
