The British government has made cuts to Legal aid to try and save 290 million from the United Kingdom’s annual legal aid budget. The Government has said that some cut backs are to be taken into account. Legal aid is the money supplied by the Government to be used to protect people’s basic rights and use the court process to help solve disputes. Legal aid helps roughly 2,000,000 people annually and the changes will mean that fewer people can claim it.
The main change is that the capital qualification (where legal aid is still available) will be reduced from 8,000 to 1,000. Also, it will also no longer be available to people who are involved with disputes with regards to children or in relation to money issues to do with divorce.
However, don’t be fooled into thinking that it’s only these cuts that will happen to the legal aid. They also are proposing to remove legal aid for clinical negligence claims and to those seeking advice about employment, education, immigration, debt, housing and benefit issues. Obviously, this will have a huge effect on the public, and it’s important to be aware of any changes that are going to happen.
Legal aid will remain for those involved with care proceedings and the industry largely expects that it will still be there for family mediation. For cases involving domestic violence they still allow someone to receive legal aid, but to determine whether it should be granted will be tested and become much stricter.
All of the cutbacks are designed to save money from the yearly legal aid budget, which is massively estimated to be a huge 2 billion. With less people having access to legal aid, the legal profession will also have to react – especially Solicitors that only carry out legal aid family work. You are sure to find out more about Government cut backs this in the press over the upcoming months.
A wide variety of different people turn to Gosschalks for legal advice. It’s common for people look on the internet at the Gosschalks website first.. This article, Changes To Legal Aid Introduced has free reprint rights.
