Legal Aid Fees
I turned on the news at 6 o'clock this evening to see a barristers strike being implemented in England & Wales today on the subject of sustainability of legal aid fees.
BBC article entitled "Lawyers Protesting outside courts over Legal Aid cuts dated 6 January 2014 (Click Here)
The news bulletin liaised with a young barrister who informed he was making £50 brief fee for doing a bail application which could see him in court all day and which did not include his travel expenses. There is also reference in the above article that barristers are not making the minimum wage: so the strike is necessary.
However, there has to be a solution and I have raised concerns on my blog about "Social Injustice" whereby a person convicted of a crime in England & Wales costs the taxpayer £45,000 a year to keep them in jail (I believe it is £31,000 a year in Scotland), whereas it is approximately £10,000-£12,000 per year to keep someone on welfare benefits to include housing benefit and who has not committed a crime. Something is clearly societally wrong.
There therefore appears to me to be a need to look at sentencing and to not sentence someone as a custodial sentence of maybe a year or at least 6 months or less for non violent crime. To instead deal with the crime as a "community benefit order" instead. This does appear to be the way forward to some degree in Scotland and perhaps England & Wales could learn something from the Scottish system ie snow shovelling etc could fall within the remit of a community benefit order.
The saving to the public purse in applying community benefit orders is at least £10,000 per person for a 6 month community benefit order who is placed on welfare benefits, ie £45,000 divided by two@6 months = £22,500 who is placed on benefits of £6,000- £12,500 releasing £10,000 costs savings for every person saved from doing a custodial sentence and snow shovelling or flood defencing etc etc for 6 months ie CRIME DOES NOT PAY!!!
The cost saving of approximately £10,000 could then go to the legal aid bill and I would have thought it would have been sensible for the legal aid bill to offset the prison bill. I would be interested to know what the prison bill actually is where the legal aid bill is currently £2 billion. I recall seeing a statistic when Tony Blair MP was in office that there was a prison population of 80,000 plus in England & Wales and they were thinking they might need to engage in a policy of prison ships to meet demand largely brought about because Tony Blair MP created 3000 pages of criminal offences for the statute books.
Codification may be necessary to take a look at what reasons people are going to jail for eg, Trentham Oldham was sentenced to a 6 month custodial sentence for wrecking the Cambridge/Oxford boat race. Whilst I agreed that he should have received a 6 month sentence I did not agree that it should be custodial as no harm came to himself, the boat crew or ancillary agencies and this should have been weighed in the balance, ie the outcome, impact or consequences of the mischief should have carried some weight in gaining access to the public purse. It would have cost approximately £20,000 to keep Trentham Oldham in jail for 6 months - for wrecking a boat race; whereas he could be at home making little impact on his wife and child, on welfare costing £6,000-£10,000 over the same period plus providing a benefit to the community - I feel sure there is plenty flood defence work in Cambridgeshire and Oxfordshire at this time.
On another issue:
Contingency fees were on the radio this morning and the ideology of no win: no fee is not working. This came in to some degree on the back of the Woolf Reforms whereby lawyers would take up a case on the premis there was no fee to pay if they lost the case. I wrote about it at the time of the Woolf Reforms querying why this was occurring:
"I carried out a preliminary search of a database on contingency fees and legal aid, the search revealed 9 entries for the former and 866 entries for the later. Of the 9 entries for contingency fees the following were of note:
1. In British Waterways Board v Norman (1993) 26 H.L.R. 232 it was held that where there is a criminal element in the litigation of the case, the implied agreement between A and her solicitor for a contingency fee was contrary to public policy.
2. In Aratra Potatoe Co Ltd v Taylor Joynson Garrett (1995) 145 RLJ rep 1402 it was held that where there was a differential fee dependent on the outcome of litigation and was included in the definition of a contingency fee. A contingency fee was champertous and unenforceable as it was contrary to public policy.
3. Price Graham v British Steel PK DJ Traynor in the County Court (Middlesborough)6/12/96 held (against the fact that P had paid an insurance premium to cover the costs and disbursements in the event that the case failed - the case settled) the contingency fee insurance premium was not recoverable from B. The disbursement arose not to further the litigation but rather in relation to the costs arrangement with his own solicitors. Accordingly the fee was disallowed.
Given the above where it is clearly cited authority that contingency fees prior to the Woolf Reforms were contrary to public policy and in the third case the client had made provision via an insurance premium, the contingency fee had provided inadequate cover is it not surprising that lawyers and barristers are no longer willing to do conditional fee arrangements. Approximately ten years on from Woolf is there a real need to look at what the Woolf Reforms actually did and to revisit some of the worst affects of those reforms, for instance on another point, the need for ADR/mediation in the legal profession at all.
Concerning my own case, I tried to get a conditional fee arrangement to no avail and tried every solicitor on the Citizen Advice Bureau list for the Royal Courts area. Nor could I get anyone to take the case pro bono and this was with the courts demanding that I have a litigant friend - there was no legal aid available for my case. The reason why I have a case is because of the treatment I experienced at a top 20 London law firm whereby my then two bosses Nick and Julian who I was headhunted to SJB with and another solicitor Zak, had the unfortunate position of having either no client work of their own and were subsisting on the coat-tails of others, or had some client work but which was largely low calibre and not the kind of case work expected of a top 20 London law firm lawyer. With the Woolf Reforms impacting and many cases going to ADR/mediation were or are there lawyers perhaps in the larger law firms who could take on legal aid cases even to give supervision and guidance to lower echelon staff such as trainees and like myself paralegals. Should not all solicitors of law firms have to do a percentage quota of their client work acting for people who need legal aid, contingency fee or pro bono work/litigant friend type work/referrals from Citizen Advice Bureau - they may pick up some valuable clients by way of reciprocity as people have employers, clients/agents, friends and family.
BBC article entitled "Lawyers Protesting outside courts over Legal Aid cuts dated 6 January 2014 (Click Here)
The news bulletin liaised with a young barrister who informed he was making £50 brief fee for doing a bail application which could see him in court all day and which did not include his travel expenses. There is also reference in the above article that barristers are not making the minimum wage: so the strike is necessary.
However, there has to be a solution and I have raised concerns on my blog about "Social Injustice" whereby a person convicted of a crime in England & Wales costs the taxpayer £45,000 a year to keep them in jail (I believe it is £31,000 a year in Scotland), whereas it is approximately £10,000-£12,000 per year to keep someone on welfare benefits to include housing benefit and who has not committed a crime. Something is clearly societally wrong.
There therefore appears to me to be a need to look at sentencing and to not sentence someone as a custodial sentence of maybe a year or at least 6 months or less for non violent crime. To instead deal with the crime as a "community benefit order" instead. This does appear to be the way forward to some degree in Scotland and perhaps England & Wales could learn something from the Scottish system ie snow shovelling etc could fall within the remit of a community benefit order.
The saving to the public purse in applying community benefit orders is at least £10,000 per person for a 6 month community benefit order who is placed on welfare benefits, ie £45,000 divided by two@6 months = £22,500 who is placed on benefits of £6,000- £12,500 releasing £10,000 costs savings for every person saved from doing a custodial sentence and snow shovelling or flood defencing etc etc for 6 months ie CRIME DOES NOT PAY!!!
The cost saving of approximately £10,000 could then go to the legal aid bill and I would have thought it would have been sensible for the legal aid bill to offset the prison bill. I would be interested to know what the prison bill actually is where the legal aid bill is currently £2 billion. I recall seeing a statistic when Tony Blair MP was in office that there was a prison population of 80,000 plus in England & Wales and they were thinking they might need to engage in a policy of prison ships to meet demand largely brought about because Tony Blair MP created 3000 pages of criminal offences for the statute books.
Codification may be necessary to take a look at what reasons people are going to jail for eg, Trentham Oldham was sentenced to a 6 month custodial sentence for wrecking the Cambridge/Oxford boat race. Whilst I agreed that he should have received a 6 month sentence I did not agree that it should be custodial as no harm came to himself, the boat crew or ancillary agencies and this should have been weighed in the balance, ie the outcome, impact or consequences of the mischief should have carried some weight in gaining access to the public purse. It would have cost approximately £20,000 to keep Trentham Oldham in jail for 6 months - for wrecking a boat race; whereas he could be at home making little impact on his wife and child, on welfare costing £6,000-£10,000 over the same period plus providing a benefit to the community - I feel sure there is plenty flood defence work in Cambridgeshire and Oxfordshire at this time.
On another issue:
Contingency fees were on the radio this morning and the ideology of no win: no fee is not working. This came in to some degree on the back of the Woolf Reforms whereby lawyers would take up a case on the premis there was no fee to pay if they lost the case. I wrote about it at the time of the Woolf Reforms querying why this was occurring:
"I carried out a preliminary search of a database on contingency fees and legal aid, the search revealed 9 entries for the former and 866 entries for the later. Of the 9 entries for contingency fees the following were of note:
1. In British Waterways Board v Norman (1993) 26 H.L.R. 232 it was held that where there is a criminal element in the litigation of the case, the implied agreement between A and her solicitor for a contingency fee was contrary to public policy.
2. In Aratra Potatoe Co Ltd v Taylor Joynson Garrett (1995) 145 RLJ rep 1402 it was held that where there was a differential fee dependent on the outcome of litigation and was included in the definition of a contingency fee. A contingency fee was champertous and unenforceable as it was contrary to public policy.
3. Price Graham v British Steel PK DJ Traynor in the County Court (Middlesborough)6/12/96 held (against the fact that P had paid an insurance premium to cover the costs and disbursements in the event that the case failed - the case settled) the contingency fee insurance premium was not recoverable from B. The disbursement arose not to further the litigation but rather in relation to the costs arrangement with his own solicitors. Accordingly the fee was disallowed.
Given the above where it is clearly cited authority that contingency fees prior to the Woolf Reforms were contrary to public policy and in the third case the client had made provision via an insurance premium, the contingency fee had provided inadequate cover is it not surprising that lawyers and barristers are no longer willing to do conditional fee arrangements. Approximately ten years on from Woolf is there a real need to look at what the Woolf Reforms actually did and to revisit some of the worst affects of those reforms, for instance on another point, the need for ADR/mediation in the legal profession at all.
Concerning my own case, I tried to get a conditional fee arrangement to no avail and tried every solicitor on the Citizen Advice Bureau list for the Royal Courts area. Nor could I get anyone to take the case pro bono and this was with the courts demanding that I have a litigant friend - there was no legal aid available for my case. The reason why I have a case is because of the treatment I experienced at a top 20 London law firm whereby my then two bosses Nick and Julian who I was headhunted to SJB with and another solicitor Zak, had the unfortunate position of having either no client work of their own and were subsisting on the coat-tails of others, or had some client work but which was largely low calibre and not the kind of case work expected of a top 20 London law firm lawyer. With the Woolf Reforms impacting and many cases going to ADR/mediation were or are there lawyers perhaps in the larger law firms who could take on legal aid cases even to give supervision and guidance to lower echelon staff such as trainees and like myself paralegals. Should not all solicitors of law firms have to do a percentage quota of their client work acting for people who need legal aid, contingency fee or pro bono work/litigant friend type work/referrals from Citizen Advice Bureau - they may pick up some valuable clients by way of reciprocity as people have employers, clients/agents, friends and family.
posted by Lesley McDade at 8:13 pm
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