Lawyers threaten industrial action over legal aid funding

Barristers have issued a warning shot” to the new government in the long-running dispute over legal aid funding, as the Criminal Bar Association raised the threat of industrial action.

- ANDY GREGORY

In a twin blow, as patience wears thin over Labour ministers’ handling of the courts crisis, the Law Society simultaneously urged solicitors to consider either scaling back or stopping taking on legal aid cases, warning that the system is now “at the limits of financial viability”.

Funding for legal aid – which helps people pay for legal advice and representation – has fallen by 28 per cent in real terms over the past decade, with remuneration fees for lawyers involved in civil cases now approximately half of their value in 1996, according to the National Audit Office.

With the pool of lawyers willing to take on such work severely diminishing, further reducing the number of people able to access legal aid after austerity-era laws tightened eligibility, legal professionals have been engaged in a years-long battle to urgently boost the funding available.

Fuelling mounting frustration, the Criminal Bar Association revealed this week that Sir Keir Starmer’s government has been sitting for two months on an independent report assessing the dire state of criminal legal aid – and urged ministers to publish it ahead of the chancellor’s upcoming Budget.

Warning that “there may be an assumption that we will not react” if the as-yet-unpublished report’s recommendations are not implemented, the group’s chair Mary Prior KC said it will ballot its members “to consider what the next steps will be” and is “ready to act in accordance with their wishes”.