Will heart triumph over brains in our two-tier legal system?

Has Chris Grayling got his head in the clouds? Can he not see the storm that is brewing over the emergence of a two-tier legal system?

Surely it was the last straw when the Master of the Rolls Lord Dyson told the House of Commons justice select committee this week that cuts in legal aid were ‘leading to miscarriages of justice’ and that people who were representing themselves were losing winnable cases?

A few weeks back the Law Gazette published extracts from a survey carried out by highly regarded, Chambers and Legal 500 rated law firm Hodges Jones and Allen. It's "Innovation in Law" report - which is available to download on its home page - found post LASPO 83% of legal professionals agree that ‘the justice system is not accessible to all members of the public’. Furthermore 87% of the 500 Solicitors and Barristers surveyed believed that wealth now held the key to access to justice.  

Hot on the heels of that came a report from the National Audit which declared that cuts to the legal aid budget are not delivering better value for money for the taxpayer. With the publishing of "Implementing Reforms to Civil Legal Aid" the NAO claimed that the Ministry of Justice had failed to think through the wider impact of its legal aid reforms on the legal system and beyond. Furthermore there has been little appetite to comprehensively measure any impact. The report also acknowledged that things get messy in court when lawyers aren't around - in the 12 months following the roll out of LASPO there was a 30% increase in family cases where neither party was represented. The 18,519 uplift in cases involving litigants in person on both sides cost the taxpayer at least £3m per year.

Then somewhere in the middle of all that MP's were laying into the leaders of the Legal Services Consumer Panel who had stirred a hornets nest when they published their report "2020 Legal Services - How regulators should prepare for the future" predicting a future of self-lawyering. The panel - which has also been vocal in its support for alternative providers of legal services such as professional McKenzie friends - came under fire from the justice committee of the House of Commons with one MP accusing them of "helping the destruction of universal access to justice and destroying careers." 

The debate is going to run and expect things to come to the boil next year. 2015 sees the 800th anniversary of the sealing of the Magna Carta - effectively a peace treaty between King John and the  barons - which asserted amongst other things that everybody will have access to swift justice!