Legal aid in most private law family cases will no longer be available from March 2013. Therefore anyone, no matter their financial circumstances, will be entitled to legal aid to deal with their divorce, separation, financial matters or children issues unless there is some form of provable domestic violence.
We family lawyers are already seeing the impact of this on many families. Finding a legal aid lawyer at present is incredibly difficult and the few firms undertaking the work are bombarded. My firm has numerous new enquiries everyday from people with family law matters wanting legal aid but we are unable to help them as we no longer do legal aid work. The decision to give up legal aid almost two years ago was an extremely difficult one but it was simply no longer possible to provide a good service on legal aid rates. Legal Aid is now to be taken away completely from early 2013 leaving thousands of people each year without access to justice.
We try to help as much as possible by offering fixed fees where we can and different hourly rates as we have several solicitors with varying levels of experience. However, some people simply cannot afford legal fees at all and they will be left unable to get proper legal advice in the future. Some say we will have the legal system we can afford, but can we afford to have a society where we are unable to get proper legal advice?
The family courts are already inundated with litigants in person who are unfamilar with the court process, how to present their cases and how to negotiate settlements. The Court system is clogged with these cases which predictably take longer for the Judges to deal with than cases where the parties are legally represented. The latter cases mostly settle with decisions being made by the parties themselves whereas when parties represent themselves they are less likely to be dispassionate about issues and not settlle. This means more court time is required for each case (delaying others) and decisions are being made for parties when, with representation, they may have made their own decisions. The Courts are already close to meltdown and this can only get worse next year when legal aid goes completely in the majority of family cases.