The lord chancellor is willing to drop a second proposed cut in fees for criminal legal aid practitioners – depending on the profession’s response to government proposals to slash fees elsewhere.
A second 8.75% fee cut was suspended for 12 months in April last year. However, publishing a consultation on litigators’ graduated fees schemes and court appointees today, justice minister Sir Oliver Heald said the lord chancellor ’is minded not to reinstate the second fee cut…while targeted and modernising fee reforms are taken forward’.
'We will seek to confirm this once the government has considered the responses to this consultation,’ he added.
The ministry proposes to reduce the threshold for pages of prosecution evidence from the current cap of 10,000 pages to 6,000 pages. It also wants to cap court appointees’ costs at legal aid rates.
The LGFS in the Criminal Legal Aid (Remuneration) Regulations 2013 remunerates litigators for Crown court work. The current scheme was introduced in 2008.
In the 2015-16 financial year, the government spent £341m on cases that completed in the LGFS.
An accompanying impact assessment document states that, in recent years, there has been a ‘steep increase’ in cases with high levels of PPE, which has increaased overall expenditure on the scheme.
The document states that this follows a costs judge decision that broadened the circumstances in which electronic evidence could be paid as PPE. ’This was not the policy intention and neither this decision nor the resultant cost was foreseen. Intervention is necessary to better scrutinise work reasonably and actually undertaken.
A consultatation on the advocates’ graduated fee scheme closes on 2 March.
MoJ: Truss willing to drop legal aid fee cut
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