A Deputy High Court judge has raised concerns after a couples were told they must represent themselves in a complex care case because they were £36 over a legal aid limit.
Judge Richard Todd said the couple, who lost the case involving their teenage child who has “complex” health needs, were at a “real disadvantage” due to no legal representation being provided.
Judge Todd has written a case outline, after finding in favour of social services bosses Greenwich Council, following a private hearing at the High Court in London.
He stated the council were right to have “retained very senior counsel” at public expense.
However, he also said:
“In a complex case such as this, legal representation is more than just desirable, it can represent the difference between a fair hearing and an unfair one.
The evidence in this case proceeded over four days.
This was primarily due to the parents’ labouring over difficult legal constructs and asking very wordy questions.
Had they been represented, then I have no doubt this case would have concluded within two days.
That would have been a huge saving to the public purse.”
Judge Todd noted the “widely held suspicion” that legal aid has been “cut back” over the years because it is “low hanging fruit”. Although, he continued:
“The beneficiaries of legal aid tended to be the ‘voiceless’ ones; people, like these parents, who are conscientious, hard-working and in employment, but not that well paid. They have become the dispossessed.
Dispossessed of legal representation, by virtue of being neither poor nor rich enough.
Legal aid was originally one of the pillars of the welfare state.
But for these people that prop is removed.”
Despite these findings, the judge ruled that due to the teenage boy’s history of “challenging behaviour”, he was beyond the parents’ control.
Judge Todd concluded that the boy must stay in council care, where he has remained for the past two years, and did not grant a care order for the child.
