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We saw some very interesting figures quoted on another site this week, which we believe our readers will be interested in and which demonstrate just how big an impact the proposed legal aid cuts are likely to have on divorce. The figures are from 2009 but there’s no reason to suppose they will be radically different this year or last year. so, here goes :-

• In 2009,  just under 114,000 divorce petitions were started.
• Over 87,000 of those divorces were funded by legal aid.
• Some 70% of divorce petitions are started by women and a proportion of those will obviously be non-working mums who do not have their own income.

Whether you are for or against divorce being fairly easy to obtain in England & Wales or for or against the legal aid system, the above clearly shows that removing legal aid in areas like divorce will have a very significant impact which is difficult to predict. With unhappy families forced to stay together, could there be a devastating impact on children ? With more people forced to go to court themselves will this result in huge extra resources being needed to run the courts thereby making the costs savings of cutting legal aid a farce ?

These are just a couple of possible if not likely outcomes, there are likely to be many more. what is your opinion ? Please do let us know.

Impact of Legal Aid cuts on employment law

Employment law is one of those areas where there has been very limited access to legal aid (only an initial interview generally) so many might think that the legal aid cuts won’t impact on this very important area of law. But that would be wrong.

With employee legal problems, due to the lack of legal aid and fact that it is not easy to get no win no fee advice from employment solicitors, the Citizen’s Advice Bureaus around the country have fulfilled a vital function in helping employees decide how to deal with problems at work such as unfair dismissal, discrimination, bullying and harassment.

If the legal aid cuts do go ahead it is very likely that  Citizens Advice Bureaux won’t have sufficient funds to help the more than 3,00 people a year they currently help.

This in turn may well have a counterproductive knock on effect for the Government. More employees will be forced to run their own cases. The Employment tribunal is free to use and generally the process is slower than other courts, so a lot of extra tribunal time could well be taken up with people representing themselves with even less knowledge of the law or rules. This in turn means more expense in running the Tribunal system which could be more expensive than the current situation where a Citizens advice advisor is a very cheap and effective alternative to using solicitors.

What do you think ?