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Opinion

Vulnerable asylum seekers need lawyers. Here's how Labour can fix the legal aid scandal

The legal system is failing asylum seekers, but solutions can be found, writes solicitor Sairah Javed

Home secretary Yvette Cooper

Asylum seekers are being denied their right to representation. It's a fixable crisis. Image: Andy Taylor/Home Office/Flickr

Our client ‘Z’ is both blind and deaf. Alone, with no representation, he came to us in desperation. The Home Office had refused his asylum claim with absolutely no regard to his special needs or actual asylum claim. They then tried to make him homeless. The system had failed him – it was only the work of the wider community and charities like ours that stopped him from falling through the cracks.

It’s at times like these that people need lawyers – but the vast majority cannot afford private fees. It is for these people that legal aid was created in the 1940s – to protect the vulnerable and allow access to justice. Colossal cuts to legal aid over the past fourteen years however, have created a slow, complex and bureaucratic system.

On top of the huge complexities of the UK’s asylum seekers, those navigating it are finding their access to essential support cut. In our outreach work with the Red Cross, we have seen victims of domestic violence struggling to secure the rights of their children and themselves due to lack of access to legal advice. People are waiting months – or even years – for decisions on their cases due to enormous Home Office backlogs.

Across the country, people are struggling to find legal support. 50% of people with asylum cases cannot find a legal aid lawyer, and there is almost no support for people with non-asylum immigration cases. Some of the people who come to us seeking support have been turned away by twelve to fifteen providers previously, because there is so much demand and so little supply of legal aid advice.

But urgent reform to the legal aid system is common sense. When people can get support, they can access their rights, put down roots and play a key role in their communities. It makes financial sense too – recent research by the Access to Justice Foundation and the Bar Council found that, “on average, providing free specialist legal advice results in a first-year saving of approximately £9,100 per person to the government. For every £1 spent on free specialist legal advice and its outcomes in 2023, there was a saving to government of £2.71.” Overall, they found that for every 100,000 clients provided with free legal advice, there was a saving to the public purse of around £908m.

But legal aid work has become unsustainable, civil legal aid rates have not increased since 1996, so doing legal aid work is a loss-making exercise. No matter what our principles, even law firms have bills to pay, so it’s a delicate balancing act for us to provide this critical service while keeping our own heads above water.  

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For access to justice to mean anything, individuals must be able to vindicate their legal entitlements. Courts must be open, litigation must be affordable and lawyers must be available.

Going forward, we need to ensure everyone who needs legal aid can access it. We must broaden the scope of legal aid to cover non-asylum immigration work and end legal aid deserts. This cannot happen without fair pay and conditions for workers – we must increase pay rates, take a collaborative approach to working with legal aid providers and introduce more accessible traineeships.

Finally, the government must commit to working across departments to fix the legal aid system. This means a total overhaul of the hostile approach to immigration policy – a less hostile system will have the knock on effect of reducing reliance on legal aid.

Despite the challenges in this sector, campaigners and legal aid lawyers up and down the country work tirelessly to represent their clients and work for a better, fairer society. Legal aid is not a luxury – it is critical to our functioning as a democracy. Access to justice is a fundamental human right, and with a human rights lawyer as our current prime minister, it must become an urgent priority.

JCWI has produced a practical toolkit on securing access to justice. You can access it on our website here.

Sairah Javed is a supervising solicitor with the Joint Council for the Welfare of Immigrants.

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