Solicitors abandoning legal aid work

The chief executive of Citizens Advice, David Harker, warned his organisation's annual conference in York that the system risked being audited out of existence, leading to advice deserts where the poor and socially excluded were unable to get the help they need.
The claims come after a shake up in the provision of legal aid in which the Legal Services Commission replaced the Legal Aid Board. Groups or individuals providing publicly funded legal services must now undergo annual audits to check the quality of their work.
Yorkshire law practices confirmed the huge strain involved in legal aid work, as many that undertake criminal cases on legal aid face new and more restrictive contracts from April next year.
Mr Harker told 1,100 delegates at York University that Government policy on legal aid was delivering injustice and unfairness.
"The reality, experienced by our bureaux staff, is that there is a continuing and deepening crisis in the provision of publicly funded legal services to the people who need them most. Hundreds of legal aid lawyers are calling it a day ñ audited out of existence," he said.
In parts of the South-East, private solicitors were abandoning the Community Legal Service entirely.
"This leads to the growth of advice deserts ñ areas where the poor and socially excluded wander in ever-increasing circles looking for help. It is clear that the current arrangements are not delivering access to justice. They are delivering injustice and unfairness, and it is inexcusable," Mr Harker said.
He referred to the "Byzantine level of bureaucracy" in dealings with the Legal Services Commission. Citizens Advice Bureaux had dealt with 5,671,987 new problems last year, many of which were dealt with under contractual agreements with the Community Legal Service.
He said advice deserts included Kent where there was no legally aided housing advice, while in Leatherhead, Surrey, there were no legal aid lawyers at all. One man had to travel 60 miles to London for a lawyer to fight an eviction order after failing to find one in Cambridge where he lived.
Leeds solicitor Rodney Lester, whose own practice is continuing to accept legal aid cases, confirmed that many were pulling out and that law firms were having to "jump through administrative hoops" to satisfy the Legal Services Commission.
"Legal aid now is seen very much as the poorly paid side of the business. We try to adopt a very strict discipline in the way we conduct our work and how organised we are but it's a very delicate balancing act and it's not getting easier," he said.
A senior partner in Thorpe & Co, Stephen Mackinder, whose firm has offices in Malton and on the Yorkshire Coast, confirmed a slow drift away from legal aid work.
He said: "There's an awful lot of form-filling and you have to have someone in the firm who knows exactly what they are doing. It's very bureaucratic and the pay is lousy. It must be a loss-making business for many."
The manager of Ryedale Citizens Advice, Sue Bywater, said: "We see an increasing number of clients who have approached solicitors in the first instance but are told no help is available. We try every source available to find the help the client is looking for, but increasingly to no great effect."
The chairman of the Bar Council, Matthias Kelly QC, added: "This bears out our fears that the Access to Justice Act 1999, which all but abolished civil legal aid, has turned out to be a sorry misnomer. The real losers are the public who are denied access to proper representation."