Giving help where the need is
THE LAW R. A. CLINE
This week two evidently rival reports emerged from the political lawyer associations offering poverty areas. The main proposal of the Society ways and means of providing legal services for for Labour Lawyers is the setting up of legal centres with salaried staffs to operate in such areas. These lawyers would grapple with the kind of problems that a poor community throws up. They would try to solye without litigation, but, if people have to go to court in the end, then the legal centre would hand the client over to the private solicitor, whose bills will be paid for as they are now by the state in the form of legal aid.
What, then, is wrong with the present system of legal aid, which was intended by its founders to operate as a kind of legal parallel to the National Health Service? The Labour lawyers rightly point out that the present system frequently fails to reach precisely those who need its help and anyway it is at the moment oriented towards court work rather than towards the kind of out-of-court prob- lems, muddles and general dust-ups that should never get anywhere near a court of law.
The lawyers of both parties are agreed that there is an unmet need for legal services. But their proposals are conceived from very different standpoints. The Conservatives reject the salaried legal service 'in the pay of the Government,' pointing to the dangers of state control over lawyers, dangers which are in- herent in the lawyer's potential role as com- batant for his client against the state. The Labour lawyers, accepting that a loss of inde- pendence would be 'a most destructive criticism of our proposal,' rather grandly dis- pose of this possibility as illusory. But if others are less ready to agree, it is because Labour Members of the House of Commons have already made it very clear that the legal pro- fession is now accountable to them and the public as recipients of public funds in the form of legal aid fees. They may be right, but the next step is a very short one—'we are the pay- masters now.' Nor is it helpful to look at American experience with the so-called neigh- bourhood firms, since the United States has not yet suffered on anything like the same scale as the British the bitter experience of the piper- paying minister who rather enjoys calling the tune.
So the Conservatives' proposals are radically different. Implicit in their report is the view that the Government's job is to interfere but not to manage; to interfere as a kind of long- stop where economics have failed to attract legal services. If there isn't a solicitor for the 89,000 residents of Bethnal Green, make it economically attractive to practise there by making grants; meanwhile, strengthen the Citizens' Advice Bureaux with qualified solici- tors; and more money, please, for the Legal Aid and Advice system. Will the unmet need be met by either scheme? There are some whom the welfare society can never reach, not if a hundred thousand more social workers were created. You cannot canvass people in their flats to establish whether they have problems which earl be classified as legal. Advertisement (whether of legal centres or citizens' advice bureaux) would help and should be permitted by the legal profession. But the helpless who will not help themselves will not be caught in this net.
Incidentally, it seems to be accepted by both groups that poor people avoid solicitors because of their 'class image.' Thus: 'The middle classes are more likely to see the law and the legal system as a source of rights and of protection: the poor are more likely to see the system as a hostile maze.' Rubbish. City gents avoid lawyers like the plague ewe rely on trusting each other') and the middle classes are equally confronted with a hostile maze. The poor do not avoid their middle-class doctors; and the writer of this article noticed no great shying away of clients in the days when he did duty at the Islington Town Hall advice bureau.
Undeniably there is a need for better legal services in impoverished areas, and the legal profession must fill it. I suggest that the Conservative proposal be tried first and if, but only if, it fails, then on to the legal centres.
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