Doubts over Ministry of Justice Legal aid cuts figures
The Legal Action Gr
oup (LAG) have analysed and criticised the MOJ figures about the potential effect of legal aid cuts.
The MOJ calculates that some 502,000 people who will lose access to civil legal advice as a result of the proposed cuts in law areas including housing, employment law, family law. The LAG believes the true figure is much higher.
Apparently using Legal Service Commission published figures from 2009, the LAG argues that a figure of 615,880 is arrived at for the number of people who would lose out on legal advice services.
If the LAG are correct, the MOJ will have underestimated thye impact by some 20%. Drilling down further it seems that 2 factors may account for the difference in figures :-
- The MoJ appears to have deleted the statistics for telephone advice
- The MOJ figures account for completed cases, not new cases. A proportion of cases never complete
