In my previous life I was a trades union lawyer in London. I left my job as a partner just over 20 years ago to come down to Cornwall with my ex-husband who was a naval pilot at Culdrose RNAS. When I moved, I ran an employment law clinic at Citizens Advice in Falmouth.
Citizens Advice does great work in Cornwall, but it struggles with funding and recently had to stop its drop-in surgeries.
The number of civil legal aid providers has fallen dramatically since the Legal Aid, Sentencing and Punishment of Offenders Act 2012 (LASPO) came into effect in 2013. This decline has hit the not-for-profit sector particularly hard, with Citizens Advice offices and Law Centres across the country forced to scale back services or close altogether due to mounting financial pressures.
We know how much of an issue access to legal aid is in the UK – particularly in rural and coastal places. There is a growing crisis in areas like mine in Cornwall.
I regularly receive correspondence from constituents who desperately need legal advice but don’t know where to turn.
In Cornwall we’re hampered by our geography in part – we’re a peninsula so people can’t easily access services in neighbouring areas.
Technology does enable greater access to legal advice in remote areas to some degree. University House Legal Advice Centre (based in East London) established a webcam advice clinic in partnership with a community centre in Falmouth. They also run a ‘family law duty desk’ at Truro Combined Court Centre, helping with section 8 private child arrangement cases and domestic abuse. But this shouldn’t be a replacement for face-to-face services. Not everyone is able to access technology in this way.
The South West suffers particularly in some areas of law from an absence of advice.
It is the region with the most housing legal aid deserts in the UK, and Cornwall has virtually no housing legal aid providers. That is really alarming considering that constituents often come to me with housing issues, some on the brink of homelessness. Over the past decade, with the rise of Airbnb in Cornwall, we’ve seen landlords serve their tenants Section 21 notices in order to ‘flip’ their property from a long-term rental to a more profitable short-term holiday let.
The Lexis-Nexis Legal Aid Deserts report showed that the South West had three family legal aid deserts (including in Devon and Cornwall) – the second highest of any region. It also showed that the South West had the most legal aid deserts for crime. We’ve seen a concerning reduction in the number of duty solicitors providing representation at police stations, meaning that many people accused of a crime will have to go through the legal process without proper legal advice.
Moreover, access to legal aid isn’t only a justice issue – it’s an economic one too. Early legal advice can save public money and lessen pressure on the system by preventing mistakes and avoiding drawn-out court proceedings. Particularly in family cases, court delays and lack of representation can cause distress to children involved.
Over the past year I’ve spoken to many individual lawyers and organisations about the prospect of setting up a legal advice centre in Cornwall to try and plug some of these gaps.
We have several solicitors and barristers in Cornwall who are keen to be involved but I’m under no illusion about the scale of the challenge.
Part of the issue is the small size of law firms in rural areas which hampers their ability to offer pro-bono advice. In contrast, for larger city law firms, pro-bono work is often embedded in corporate social responsibility initiatives.
We also struggle for private funding, and the costs of insurance and hiring an office space are prohibitive.
The Westminster Commission on Legal Aid suggested one potential solution to the problem of legal aid deserts is collaborative hubs where firms and advice centres share costs and expertise. These could serve multiple practice areas, and would help to reduce some of the barriers in rural areas like mine.
At the same time we must think about how we tackle regional inequality in legal provision and how we make legal aid work a viable career choice for young lawyers. Legal aid salaries cannot compete with those offered by corporate law firms – they do not even come close. Scholarships and training bursaries for legal aid lawyers would be a step in the right direction.
Finally, I welcomed last year’s announcement from the Ministry of Justice to uplift fees for housing & debt and immigration & asylum legal aid, injecting an additional £20 million annually into the sector—the first significant investment since 1996. But this cannot be the end of the conversation. There is so much to be done to tackle ‘legal aid deserts’ – otherwise the gap in provision will only widen, leaving the most vulnerable without the support they need.
