Legal Aid Reform: How are Women Affected?

I attended the APPG meeting on ‘Legal Aid Reform: How are Women Affected?’ We heard from over a dozen speakers including Emma Scott, Director of Rights of Women, Linda Lee, President of the Law Society, Carol Storer of the LAPG and Richard Miller, Head of Legal Aid Policy at the Law Society. Richard highlighted how older women will be prejudicially affected in that (i) with the removal of ancillary relief from the funding scope many will be prevented from seeking pension sharing orders and will be thrown onto benefits unnecessarily and (ii) by taking equity in property into account older women who have more equity will be taken outside the scope of legal aid and thus be discriminated against. So many case studies were given of women in the most vulnerable groups (trafficked, abused, homeless, single parents, abandoned) who would no longer be within scope under the reforms. Yet research shows that 90% of these women were successful in their cases justifying their representation (http://www.rightsofwomen.org.uk/policy.php ). It was also widely acknowledged that the MoJ’s reform policy conflicts with the Home Office’s immigration policy which recognises a claim for asylum by women who have suffered violence and yet the MoJ under these reforms would not pay for her representation. Sue Shutter from Labour MP Fiona Mactaggart’s office said that there has not been a legal aid firm in Slough for a long time and they fear even more people will be coming to their surgeries. There was a consensus in the room that fewer women will be able to access justice if these reforms were implemented and the reforms are tantamount to the Government silencing women and breaching their right to a fair trial. Over 5,000 of us within the profession responded to the proposals for reform. The Justice Committee has recently released their report which indicates that the grossly damaging proposed cuts to the scope of funding may be placed on hold pending further research but that the Government will make the savings they seek by implementing a 10% reduction in fees for civil and family legal aid. We expect the Government’s final response after the 5 May referendum. There has been what the Government call a ‘fees standstill’ for 10 years. To quote Lenin on Women’s Working Day in 1920 “The chief task of the working women’s movement is to fight for economic and social equality, and not only formal equality, for women. The chief thing is to get women to take part in socially productive labor, to liberate them from ‘domestic slavery’, to free them from their stupefying and humiliating subjugation to the eternal drudgery of the kitchen and the nursery”. How sad that this quote seems relevant today. With the majority of legal aid lawyers being female is legal aid family law a new ‘caring profession’? Is the fees cut in effect a two-pronged attack on women – further pay inequality and rights retracted rather than advanced?

Zoe Fleetwood