The government is set to announce by the end of November whether it will increase legal aid rates for asylum seekers, with the Lord Chancellor recognising the “urgency” of the issue following Duncan Lewis’s legal challenge.
Duncan Lewis turns away 80% of cases referred through NGOs. Where it previously opened 4,000 cases a year, Duncan Lewis can now only cope with around 800. Wilsons, another large legal aid firm, has reduced the number of asylum cases it takes on by 47% since 2014.
Stacey Edgar, the deputy CEO of South West London Law Centres (SWLLC), said the charity, which offers legal aid, has to turn away most of the 80-100 inquiries they get each month.
For the cases that are taken on, firms incur losses. Duncan Lewis estimates an annual loss of £700,000 a year. Wilsons loses £8 an hour on work it takes on.
An asylum claim is usually decided on the basis of two interviews with the Home Office. Without a lawyer to advise them, applicants can fail to mention something, don’t feel safe revealing details, or don’t realise something is relevant.
“That can be taken by the Home Office as a point against an applicant in relation to their credibility. Why didn’t you tell us this before if that’s what really happened?’,” said Bloom.
Edgar recalled a woman working with SWLLC who was trafficked into sex work. “That was the worst thing that had happened to her, and she had to tell that story again and again and again to strangers,” Edgar said.
“It makes the worst thing that happened to her a constant thing that she goes through every time she tells it.”
Much of the work for Edgar’s team, she said, involved undoing cases messed up through a lack of representation. “We get the case and it’s been messed up, and we have to go back and reconstruct the whole case. That’s kind of a specialism of ours – we see it again and again,” said Edgar.
“People get themselves in an awful mess because they have tried to do it themselves,” she said. “And they have so many barriers to communicating clearly: language, trauma, a system that’s designed to be hostile towards them, the fact that legal jargon is impenetrable to everyone anyway.”
Amid complaints from one Tory MP that asylum seekers receiving legal aid leads to “spurious appeals and blatant delaying tactics”, lawyers told the Big Issue the current system simply costs the taxpayer more down the line.
“It probably does cost the government more in the long run not providing decent access to legal aid at the very start of people’s cases,” said Bloom. “We see a lot of appeals where they don’t even need to be before the tribunal. If their case had been dealt with the first time round, they would have likely received a grant of leave or asylum straight off the bat.”
In June, Duncan Lewis took Alex Chalk, the then-Lord Chancellor to the high court, arguing he was failing in his responsibility to make legal aid available. Now the Big Issue has learned the firm has withdrawn the claim after the new Lord Chancellor agreed to make a decision on increasing legal aid rates – although the decision will be made “in the context of the budget” being delivered on 30 October.
Meanwhile, a review of civil legal aid is ongoing, but Bloom holds out little hope. “All the review is going to result in is yet another consultation process where everyone’s going to say the same things we’ve said for years and years,” he said.
A government spokesperson said: “We are committed to ensuring legal advice is available to those who need it most. The Legal Aid Agency regularly monitors the level of support available, taking swift action wherever issues arise.”
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