I am delighted to be addressing you today.
I want to start out by paying tribute to the many dedicated and conscientious lawyers who carry out legal aid work.
It is a privilege to be Legal Aid Minister. Legal Aid is an important heritage that we must protect. I speak unashamedly as a Labour Minister. I value what you are doing and I intend to ensure that we continue to support Legal Aid to ensure a fair and effective criminal justice system, and to help those whose fundamental rights are at risk or who suffer from social exclusion.
Commitment to Legal Aid
Legal Aid is unquestionably at the heart of our legal system. I see Legal Aid as a fundamental public service which ensures that justice is done and that the courts can work efficiently.
The Government has shown commitment to Legal Aid - criminal and civil. Spending has risen from £1.5bn in 1997 to £2bn.
We have established the Community Legal Service to improve the capacity of Legal Aid to address individuals' and communities' needs.
And we have also set up the Legal Services Commission, which has improved the way we contract for legal services on behalf of users, establishing quality standards for that provision. Importantly, one of the best things about the Legal Services Commission is the Regional Committee structure around the country, made up of lawyers and others, informing the centre.
I want to talk about some of the issues facing Legal Aid, how we have been addressing these and the approach I want to take to the future.
Vision and problems
Looking forward, I want to maintain and develop a sustainable service which best delivers what people need.
In taking this forward, there are a number of issues we will need to consider and address.
We will need to reflect on what Legal Aid is currently achieving for people and for society. We know what Legal Aid was set up to do in 1945, when 88% were eligible, but now, due to economic change, it is more like 40%. Are we currently delivering the right outcomes and helping people in the right way? Could we deliver the service in smarter ways with better results for customers?
The trend of rising criminal expenditure (and to a lesser extent public family law spending) has also become increasingly apparent. But I am pleased that we have been able to increase contracts and matter starts. There are now more than 700,000 new case starts this year.
And trust in the legal system will continue to be an issue as the system comes under more strain.
Outcomes
I would like to focus firstly on the Community Legal Service.
The CLS makes a substantial contribution to protecting fundamental rights and tackling social exclusion. It was set up in 2000 to provide greater and more easily accessible civil legal advice services to people within England and Wales. Let's remember the picture before the CLS: no referral, no network, no co-ordination; services had grown in an ad-hoc, uncoordinated way, reliant on discretionary funding from local authorities, charities and central Government. There was no regular assessment of need; thus funds were not always targeted effectively. Against that we have CLSPs. I know there is more to do - the Matrix report highlights that, but it is important to recall where we came from.
Of course, we know that the CLS is not perfect. In relative terms, it is still a very new creation. But there is little doubt that it is a vast improvement on what came before. We know the CLS can be improved. We need to know how best this can be done. An independent review has evaluated just how effective the CLS has been in achieving its aims and has suggested how it can be developed for the future. The report of the review was published earlier this week, and I am currently considering its recommendations.
We aim to continue to improve access to justice and rights for ordinary members of the public throughout England and Wales. Recent research by the Legal Services research Centre, 'Causes of Action: Civil Law and Social Justice', which I had the pleasure of helping launch on February 12th, gives us a much clearer picture of need. We now have a firmer grasp of the nature and frequency of civil justice problems, which will lead us to formulate more effective solutions. That's important as well. This piece of work previously could not be done. We didn't know who was out there doing that work.
The evidence from the LSRC research suggests that justiciable problems cluster, with some people experiencing a significant number of different justiciable problems (for example a cluster of rental housing problems relates clearly to homelessness, often to theft and unfair treatment by the police).
And there is evidence that certain justiciable problems which people experience, including relationship breakdown and domestic violence, can act as a trigger to additional problems as well.
We need to understand more fully how access to justice can best help people improve their lives and the extent of the impact which legal services can have on the causes of social exclusion.
In recent years, there has been increased innovation in a mixture of alternative ways to deliver legal advice and support, for example increased use of mediation, and last week I was in Manchester County Court launching the mediation service; growth in the Not For Profit sector; increased use of Conditional Fee Agreements - I want to see them work better; and am talking to the Civil Justice Council to ensure this improves; improved referral networks such as FAInS, encouraging mediation and avoiding breakdown, and the Public Defender Service, about which there will be a report in 2005.
We want Legal Aid spending to be well targeted on achieving the outcomes we want.
And we need to continue to explore new ways to best and most cost-effectively deliver the outcomes we want, and meet people's needs. This was something I wanted to emphasise to the Constitutional Affairs Committee when I gave evidence. Examples of this are Job Centre Plus, Connexions, PALS.
The Law Society's Proposals for the Future Delivery of Legal Aid Services are helpful and constructive in identifying options and possible ways forward. We must join that up with the CLS.
Spending
Our budget this year is some £2 billion in resource terms. That's a big bill, by any standards. Expenditure has increased by 28% whilst inflation was only 12% in the same period.
Legal Aid spending per head in this country is higher than in any other European country. So, yes, we must examine our own context. But we must also bear in mind the wider picture: Sweden, the Netherlands, and Canada are cutting Legal Aid.
I cannot hold out any hope that the overall budget will be increased again (beyond the rate of inflation) in the near future.
I continue to have to wrestle with pressures which push spending above budget, and must ensure that we are getting the maximum return on our public investment.
This is not simply a matter of cost saving. Wider policy goals, for example increasing the number of effective criminal trials, and encouraging people into mediation are intertwined with controlling legal aid expenditure.
We all know that there are problems within the legal aid system, including the long-term sustainability of the supply of legal aid lawyers and the evidence of unmet need.
As I have already set out, the Government has been fairly unstinting in its support for legal aid - both financially and in more innovative policy terms.
We have had a study of supply, demand and purchasing of legal services undertaken for us, which we published earlier this week. And David Clementi is reviewing the regulatory framework for legal services in England and Wales. So we are gathering evidence on which to base future improvements across the board.
But we still have a challenge to live within our budget. I need to ensure that the best value possible is realised from legal aid spending.
We have already put in place measures to tackle immediate pressures from criminal and asylum legal aid spending.
And we are taking vigorous steps to reduce that pressure for example by rolling out the Very High Cost Cases regime and preparing a CDS Bill.
In terms of asylum, there have been severe challenges in dealing with increased applications. There have been financial implications across the board, not least when it comes to legal aid costs, which is why we have made some recent changes to improve the asylum legal aid system. Costs have gone from £81.3m in 2000-01 to £174.2m in 2002-03, [a rate of increase far in excess of the increase in the number of asylum seekers over this period]. The 5-hour financial threshold for the initial decision-making process, the requirement for LSC approval prior to asylum appeal case work and unique client numbers to reduce unnecessary changes of solicitor, have all been introduced to ensure legal aid is properly targeted on those genuine and complex cases where there is a real prospect of success.
And, at the same time, I have to recognise a number of pinch-points in our remuneration arrangements and overall support for the professions.
We have a continuing duty to ensure that we are getting best value for money from the £2bn of public money. And we therefore need to build on these changes.
We need to understand how the way that legal processes work determines the volume of Legal Aided work undertaken. We need to identify processes, and areas of CJS under-performance, which significantly increase the work of the defence but do little to advance the fairness and effectiveness of the justice system. We need to look in particular at high cost cases that make up a large proportion of crown court costs - such that 1% of cases account for around 50% of crown court costs. I pay tribute to LAPG, and to the work of your Chairman and President. It is important to defend the interests of members and engage in representing these. I am also grateful for the work with the Law Society, DCA and the LSC.
Conclusion
Great strides have been taken already in improving publicly funded legal services, but we know that more needs to be done.
We should be proud of the Legal Aid system.
But against this background, I am determined that we should succeed in fundamentally reforming and strengthening legal aid in serving the public.