LONDON (Bywire News) - For the first time in nearly eight years, lawyers are set to take direct action against the government. It’s over its failings on Legal Aid but comes against a backdrop of a war of words between the legal profession and justice secretary Dominic Raab.
Bywire News previously reported on the situation with Legal Aid. Since 2010/11, successive governments have cut legal aid spending by 10% a year. The pandemic brought additional challenges – causing huge disruption in the justice system, compounded by government cuts in this area too. And now, the Tories are looking to reform the system yet again.
Over three years ago, the government commissioned a review into Legal Aid. As BBC News reported, it did this because of: “predictions the legal aid system could collapse”.
Fast-forward to December 2021 and the review body published its report. It found that the government needed to put a minimum of £135m into the Legal Aid system to stop it from falling apart. But the chair of the review panel, former judge Sir Christopher Bellamy QC, was fairly scathing in his verdict on how successive governments had managed Legal Aid. BBC News noted he said:
“£135m is, in my view, the minimum necessary as the first step in nursing the system of criminal legal aid back to health after years of neglect…
I do not see that sum as 'an opening bid' but rather what is needed, as soon as practicable, to enable... the whole criminal justice system to function effectively, to respond to forecast increased demand, and to reduce the backlog.
There is in my view no scope for further delay."
But delay the government did, saying it would not be publishing its response to the report until March this year. So, the Criminal Bar Association (CBA) has stepped in.
It’s the professional body representing around 2,500 criminal barristers. Already, it’s been highly critical of the government. As Bywire News previously reported, after Raab wrote an article for the Times which took aim at the CBA and the profession more broadly over Legal Aid – the CBA hit back.
But the organisation was also already proposing its members take direct action. This was in the event that the government didn’t publish its response to the review by 14 February. It would take the form of them withdrawing their labour from certain legal aid cases.
So, that date has passed – and on Tuesday 15 February the CBA said enough is enough.
In an email to its members, the organisation said:
“The results of our survey in January were resoundingly clear: 94% of criminal barristers who responded demanded that, by 14th February, the Secretary of State for Justice should give an undertaking that he would provide his full response to CLAR and complete any consultation process by the end of March. You were unequivocal that you would be prepared to take action if he failed to give such an undertaking.
The deadline has now passed and we have received no undertaking. Following a meeting of the CBA Executive… it has therefore been resolved that we will now proceed to a ballot for action to be issued on 28th February."
The CBA will release more details on Monday 21 February.
So, for the first time since 2014 barristers are set to withdraw their labour. Much like then, this is not exactly a strike – but a pointed statement to the government. This move is made all the more impactful by the fact that lawyers rarely do this kind of thing. Yet the situation now is not dissimilar to how it was eight years ago when lawyers previously took action over government Legal Aid reforms.
As the Independent wrote at the time:
“Barristers believe they are being deliberately misrepresented as "fat cat" lawyers, milking the public purse. Gareth Hughes from 2 Pump Court, said that Grayling's claim of criminal barristers taking home an average of £100K a year was "simply not true" and that the Ministry of Justice were "cynically manipulating the figures to influence public opinion"."
Now, we have the government doing the same thing: manipulating figures, targeting lawyers using populist slurs and running the legal system into the ground.
CBA members withdrawing their labour is clearly a last resort for them. But at a time when the government is hell-bent on the degradation of not only the criminal justice system, but society more broadly, any direct action should be welcomed – and is sorely needed.
(Writing by Steve Topple, editing by Klaudia Fior)