Legal aid: refocusing on priority cases
Status: Closed - with response
Open date: 16 July 2009
Close date: 08 October 2009
Responses published: 03 February 2010
A consultation setting out proposals for reforming the legal aid rules to ensure that limited resources are focused on priority cases.
The changes proposed include:
- strengthening public interest considerations in deciding whether to grant civil legal aid
- ceasing to provide funding for low priority civil and criminal matters, where issues can be resolved instead through complaints procedures or ombudsman schemes
- restricting access to civil legal aid for those not resident in the UK
- notifying the other side when civil legal aid is applied for to discourage fraudulent applications.
- Legal aid: refocusing on priority cases - consultation paper (PDF 0.19mb 46 pages)
- Annex A - Draft impact assessment (PDF 0.23mb 32 pages)
- Legal aid: refocusing on priority cases - list of questions for response (Word 0.06mb 4 pages)
Response (partial)
This is a partial response to the proposal in the consultation paper concerning prison law treatment advice. Most of the 44 respondents did not support the proposal that advice to prisoners on treatment matters be removed from the scope of the Criminal Defence Service. The response sets out our intention to implement an amended proposal which will not remove such advice from scope, but will ensure that funding for such cases is controlled tightly.
A response covering all of the other proposals in the consultation paper, which affect civil legal aid, will be published separately.
- Legal aid: refocusing on priority cases (PDF 0.08mb 19 pages)
- Impact assessment of changes to prison law treatment advice (PDF 0.10mb 15 pages)
Response (final)
This is the government's response to the Legal Aid: Refocusing on Priority Cases consultation, which proposed changes to the civil legal aid funding rules to refocus resources onto priority cases, and to improve our processes for detecting fraudulent legal aid applications early on.
The response paper includes a summary of the 94 responses and also sets out the changes to our proposals we have made as a result of the representations we received.
- Legal aid: refocusing on priority cases final response (PDF 0.36mb 58 pages)
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