Legal News

The Welsh Assembly’s law officer and chief legal adviser, the Counsel General, has said that the UK Government’s decision to close law courts across Wales and restrict the availability of legal aid is threatening people’s fundamental social and human rights to access the justice system.

Counsel General for Wales, Mick Antoniw, was made his comments at his inaugural speech.

Speaking at Cardiff University’s school of law, Mr Antoniw said:

“The legal system in Wales is at a crossroads – in post-war Britain, access to justice and the administration of justice has never been so limited and restricted.

“Now – to whole sections of the Welsh and UK population – the law is an imposition and not a vehicle for empowerment and emancipation.”

Mr Antoniw went on to say that the former president of the Law Society, Andrew Caplen, highlighted in a speech in 2014 that “the rule of law is rightly regarded as being the foundation of any democratic society – but the rule of law is meaningless if there is no access to justice: it is pointless to be granted rights if you have no way of enforcing them”.

Mr Antoniw also said that the abolition of legal aid for the majority of people in the areas of social welfare law, family law, housing and debt, was “more than a mere restriction of access to justice”.

“The changes we have experienced in the past few years represent an end to the ideological consensus between political parties across the UK reached in 1945 that access to justice is a fundamental social and human right – and an imperative in the building of a fairer and more equal society.”

“Another principle of access to the law is that courts and tribunals should be based in local communities with judges, magistrates and tribunal chairs who know and understand the community,” he added.

“The recently announced closure of another ten court buildings in Wales is another nail in the coffin of this principle – the closures are more to do with cost cutting than efficiency in the administration of justice.”

Former Justice Secretary Chris Grayling announced cuts in access to Legal Aid in 2014, in an attempt to reduce the annual legal aid bill from £2.1 billion.

Restrictions to access legal aid have been blamed for more people representing themselves in court – especially the family and divorce courts court – as litigants in person, without having the required knowledge of the law and legal processes to represent themselves adequately.

The cuts also affected fees charged by solicitors and barristers working under the legal aid system, meaning that in complex cases, the Legal Aid Agency was not always able to fund senior barristers with the required expertise in a particular area of law.

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