Further supplementary evidence submitted
by the Legal Aid Practitioners Group
FRONTIER ECONOMICS
RESEARCH REPORT
David Lammy referred during his evidence to
the Frontier Economics report into supply and demand for legal
aid. I presume that the Committee has also now seen this report.
I, and my committee, saw it for the first time
on 27 April. We have serious reservations about it, and would
be grateful if these could be made known to the Committee.
On the supply side, the most important concern
relates to the sample of suppliers. Those firms in the sample
rely on legal aid on average for 59% of their income. According
to LSC estimates, half of the supplier base is less than 25% reliant
on legal aid. Frontier acknowledges that the extent of reliance
has a significant impact on a firm's response to economic stimuli
(eg page 36, page 40). Nonetheless, the report's conclusions could
be mistakenly read as being applicable across the supplier base
as a whole, rather than just to the small, heavily reliant subset
of it.
There is no attempt in the report to analyse
the different issues facing firms in cities, market towns and
rural areas. Any attempt to understand the legal aid supply network
is incomplete without such an analysis.
The estimate of excess capacity is based on
a supposed "norm" of a firm's fee earners averaging
1,380 chargeable hours per year. 10% of the sample had averages
exceeding 1,800 hours. The generally accepted measure of a full-time
fee earner's capacity, taking into account training and supervision
requirements, unchargeable administration and management time,
is 1,100 chargeable hours. The much higher norm used has a major
bearing on quality of life issues, which in turn affects the decision
by lawyers whether to accept the significantly lower salaries
available for legal aid work. There is no analysis of why the
chargeable hours of the sample firms exceed the accepted norm
by so much, or what implications this has for economic management
of the system.
The private work comparators (page 56) do not
make sense. Personal injury work is case-specific skilled litigation
for which relatively high rates are charged to private clients.
In terms of the skills required, it would be relatively easy to
switch to legal aid work. It is lumped in with residential conveyancing,
a process driven routine type of work, which is now commonly performed
by paralegals and charged at relatively low rates. It would be
much more difficult to transfer staff from this to most legal
aid work due to the significantly different skills required. And
we cannot accept that across the supplier base as a whole, family
law legal aid contract holders dedicate only 4% of their chargeable
hours to private family work. We suspect that this anomalous finding
is another consequence of the excessively high relative reliance
on legal aid of the sample.
There is no attempt in the report to match the
supposed excess capacity to excess demand. It is of no use to
a housing client in Northumberland that there may be spare immigration
lawyers in London.
Various types of analysis that would have been
valuable have not proved possible because the sample, when disaggregated,
proved too small for meaningful conclusions to be drawn.
All in all, the relatively small size and unrepresentative
nature of the sample make the supply-side conclusions unreliable.
We categorically reject the assertion that the survey responses
"provide a good basis for analysis in terms of representativeness
in general", and the conclusion derived from this unrepresentative
sample that there is excess supply.
The whole section on demand proved to be a grave
disappointment. When this review was announced, we had assumed
that the starting point for the analysis of demand would be to
consider what unmet demand (and unmet need) presently exists.
Since the report was completed, Pascoe Pleasance's work for the
LSC has uncovered substantial unmet need. Citizens Advice published
a report identifying substantially increased difficulties in seeking
to refer clients to solicitors. Evidence has emerged of the number
of firms running out of matter starts last year and having to
turn clients away.
We had expected that the analysis would then
go on to examine the factors that might cause changes to the levels
of demand over the coming years. We should have seen consideration
of the likely impact on demand for legal aid services of various
policy and legislative developments that have been implemented
or are ongoing, such as the Effective Trial Management Project,
the Mental Health Bill, the Criminal Justice Act, the Domestic
Violence Bill, the increases in police numbers in recent years,
the Terrorism Acts, ASBOs, the Proceeds of Crime Act, and trends
in asylum, to name just a few of the factors that influence demand.
To give one very concrete example, the recently-published DCA
Annual Report contains a target of an additional 200,000 criminal
cases being brought to Court. Where is the consideration of the
impact of that on the demand for legal aid?
This could then have formed the basis of an
intelligent discussion about to what extent and how Government
could meet that demand. Consideration could have been given as
to what are the highest priority areas, where changes to scope
and eligibility should be made, and how far changes to the purchasing
arrangements could help to meet more of the demand.
As such, we consider that the report represents
a missed opportunity to get to grips with the issues facing Government
and the profession.
When the failure to analyse demand is added
to the flaws in the analysis of supply, it is clear that the report
does not address the issues of supply and demand facing the Legal
Services Commission, and that its conclusions have little application
to the real world conditions that we all face.
Richard Miller
Director
6 May 2004
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