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The incredible shrinking legal aid statistics
Law Gazette reports that LSC’s annual report, published last week, reveals that the total number of acts of assistance it funded over the past year fell by 7.5%, from 2.7 million in 2010-11 to just under 2.5 million.
Data shows that the number of people using the telephone to seek publicly funded legal advice dropped by 22% in 2011/12, down from 124,819 cases to 97,872. And use of the telephone triage service fell by 24%, from 264,339 calls last year to 200,737 this year.
This drop comes as the government is figuring out how to implement plans for a mandatory telephone gateway, which people will have to call before getting advice on any civil or family problem. The government hails the ‘telephone gateway’ as a way of making advice more accessible, but the evidence suggests that the telephone is not the way people seek help, and therefore the new regime will do nothing to assist access to justice.
Where people have increasingly gone to seek help are Community Legal Advice Centres (CLACs), which saw a 51% upturn in the number of family cases dealt with last year, rising from 1,380 to 2,088 and a 37% increase in the number of non-family cases, up from 17,135 in 2010/11 to 23,500 in 2011/12.
In April the LSC announced it will be ending the nine remaining CLAC contracts next year.
Therefore demonstrating its complicity in the deliberate restriction of access to justice. (Except for those who can afford to pay for it).
A disgrace!
It’s pretty difficult not to arrive at that exact conclusion Ben.