Select Committee on Constitutional Affairs Fourth Report


4.The impact on supply

85. There was a widespread view amongst respondents to the consultation that the original proposals would result in a large number of practitioners leaving publicly funded immigration and asylum work. Respondents also suggested that those most likely to remain would not be the high-quality providers, but those who were content to do sub-standard work. This, it was suggested, went against the grain of the work which the Legal Services Commission and others had been doing to try to raise standards in this area. As Nick Oakeshott, from the Refugee Legal Centre, said:

    [T]here have been efforts to improve the quality of practitioners, especially the Legal Services Commission's efforts to finance the training of new practitioners in dispersal areas and the funds that they have put forward in respect of that. I think that there is a risk with equating poor practitioners with expense and using the blunt instrument [of capping]…to try and address that because there is a risk that the blunt instrument is in fact a sledgehammer and squashes the decent practitioners as well and that will not be good for anybody.[106]

86. Alison Stanley, from the Law Society, gave us some indication of the likely scale of the problem:

    The Law Society conducted a survey of immigration practitioners and nearly half, 48%, said that they would give up conducting publicly funded immigration asylum work for professional reasons because it was impossible to work under the present cap. ILPA, the Immigration Law Practitioners Association, had a meeting when the consultation first came out and 56 of the 60 firms that were represented at that meeting also indicated that they would consider pulling out of the system. That is extremely worrying because in our view that would leave only the poorest practitioners who would think they could do a decent job in the capped hours that are…left in the system.[107]

87. Responding earlier to written questions put by the Committee in connection with its wider inquiry into the immigration appeals system, the DCA stated that:

    It is right to say that a number of reputable firms carrying out immigration and asylum work have indicated that they are not able to do an effective job within the five hour cap on work prior to the initial Home Office decision and a four hour cap on preparation for appeals. The Immigration Law Practitioners Association (ILPA) has made the argument that incompetent firms which merely wish to make money out of the system will not have a difficulty with the five hour cap.

    It may well be that the most expensive firms some of which are of good quality, will not continue in the contracting system. However there is a trade off here between quality and cost. If all asylum clients went to the most expensive firms which take longest to complete a case the cost of funding lawyers would cease to be affordable. There are many firms which have been judged to be of an acceptable standard and which are likely to adapt to working these proposals or to any compromise solution which emerges following consultation. As the numbers of asylum seekers is falling, a certain degree of loss of supply can be accommodated.[108]

This view was reinforced by the Minister's comments in oral evidence to us.[109]

88. The DCA's revised proposals were submitted too late for us to test the reactions of our witnesses to its alternative approach. We were unable to explore whether, as a result of the new proposals, there was now a reduced risk of practitioners leaving publicly funded work in this field.

89. It is almost impossible to assess the likely effects of what the Government is now proposing because of earlier policy announcements—the effects of which have not been quantified—and further announcements after the conclusion of our oral evidence sessions. The Government's proposals have now been modified in potentially helpful, but still far from specific, ways. It is therefore difficult, not only for us but also for all the interested parties affected, to assess what the consequences are likely to be—and we are not at all convinced that the two Departments have succeeded in doing so, or even attempted to do so. In what we recognise to be a difficult area of policy-making, vigorous efforts need to be made to ensure a "joined-up" approach.


106   Q 66 Back

107   Q 56 Back

108   AIA 34, published on the Committee's website, available at www.parliament.uk Back

109   Q 17 Back


 
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