Treat Legal Aid Contributions as a Debt

Policing & Security
1

When people are facing criminal matters in the Crown Court they may require Legal Aid. These days, you are expected to contribute to your defence costs even when you have Legal Aid in place. This is known as a Contribution Order.

A Contribution Order is based on an assessment by the Legal Aid agency of your means. They take 90% of your assessed disposable income. They only consider basic living costs in mitigation such as rent/mortgage, Council Tax, and basic utility costs (not including things like broadband). They aim to take everything else. For instance, any debt payments are not disregarded.

Once they have worked everything out you will be told a total amount. You can pay this in one lump sum, or over a period of six months. If you pay all five initial payments on time you get your sixth payment free as an incentive to be on time. If you miss payments or can’t afford them you will find Marstons debt collectors on your doorstep.

As someone who has recently experienced this system, let me assure you that the system is ‘never wrong’. They assessed me, came up with a figure, and then I lost my job and income dropped sharply. It took them time to reconsider the figure in light of changed circumstances, and so I was left having to find relatively huge amounts of money with no income.

Trying to keep up with payments and meet the demands of the Legal Aid Agency caused me no end of stress, and made me feel suicidal. The impact of the Legal Aid Agency and Contribution Orders was just as bad as facing the criminal matter I was charged with.

To add salt into the wound, now that I have been fully acquitted and exonerated, it will take the Legal Aid Agency 8-10 weeks to return my money to me. If I took that long to make a payment to them I would have debt collectors on my doorstep.

So what is the solution?

Legal Aid Contributions should be treated in the same way as a student debt. That is, it should be lodged as a debt against the defendant. If they are found guilty the debt becomes enforceable, which would carry across their prison term and into their life after prison. Repayments would be set at an amount that is affordable, similar to student loans, allowing ex-prisoners to rehabilitate, get back on their feet, and contribute to society again - including repayment of their Legal Aid debt. If they are found not guilty, the debt is simply cleared off.

Doing it this way saves everyone time, hassle, stress and money. You the taxpayer are funding it all anyway. You are funding Marstons effectively as they are the sole company appointed to collect Legal Aid Contributions. By removing the need invoice people, chase payments, instruct collectors, etc, the taxpayer saves money in the administration of the system. Bear in mind that the Contribution Order is for legal costs, it is not for the administration of the system, so a leaner administration is a saving for taxpayers.

For the falsely accused, like me, it means you don’t have to endure a second layer of hell at an already difficult time. The genuinely guilty still have to pay, the same amounts, just at the end of the process not at the start. Marstons still get paid because they can be used to enforce the debt if need be.

With this suggested change, everyone wins.

2 Likes
2

I am sorry you went through that. This entire endeavour just makes me think about how the Government has this “Rules for thee, but not for meee” derangement about it.
Whatever happened to being able to handshake over a matter, but instead we are met with the iron fist that leers at us, and is always ready to make an example of us.
Bring back our rights.

3

I tend to agree with some of what you have said, but not everything. For instance, how do we collect this student-loan-like debt from a convicted murderer who has been given several whole-life tariffs? Should we be accepting that we will just never get the money?

As a general rule, I am also against student loans as they currently stand as a form of hidden national debt anyway


As such, I would much prefer either

  1. We properly fund legal aid, don’t expect money back and take it as part of running a civilised country that we need to ensure that people have access to legal representation; or,
  2. People found guilty are subject to collection immediately via a High Court writ of possession (removal of goods if no money is forthcoming).

There is a potential issue with option 2 mind, and that is the conflict of interest. Legal aid may lean on baristers to do worse at their jobs and get more people found guilty in order to save the state money. Or they will do as they currently are and paying pittance for legal aid cases to encourage the good baristers to not take on the representation.

4

Thanks for your engagement and thoughtful points. I appreciate where you’re coming from. On the point about getting the money back, on conviction all those who received Legal Aid are required to repay the full amount as it currently stands. For instance, let’s say they assess you as needing to pay £5,000 via the Contribution Order but your actual full costs end up being £20,000 you’d have to find the £15,000 gap on conviction. This is currently achieved via a Capital Contribution Order. In short, this is the mechanism by which they’ll take what they’re owed, including by taking the equity in your house if need be.

Worth noting that under the current system if you are a recipient of Universal Credit you don’t have to contribute anything, even if convicted (as I understand it). If you don’t own a home they can look at an Interest Contribution Order instead, which is how they take money from your wages.

Broadly speaking, there is already a loan-like situation in place - it’s just for the ‘gap’ at the moment, whereas I am saying we should do away with the requirement for up-front contributions. It’s like, why have two systems (contributions and loan/debt) when we could just have one (loan/debt).

An argument against myself could be that the reason why we have this mess was to stop vexatious lawyers using Legal Aid to ‘ambulance chase’ claims relating to the NI Troubles to persecute former soldiers. Hence, a different way of discouraging that would be needed otherwise the vexatious lawyers would just run up the debts at risk.

NB: I am coming at this from a particular perspective so do very much welcome the broader input - exactly what this platform is good at.

5

I don’t think that the vexatious lawyer is a massive problem, and to the extent it is, the obvious solution is making legal aid a pool of baristers who are semi-randomly assigned legal aid cases. “If you want to pick your representation, you get to pay for it, otherwise, you take what you are given.”

This has its own problems. Legal aid occurs in both civil and criminal litigation, and whilst this works okay for the criminal side, not so much for the civil as you generally want the ability to consult with a lawyer before you bring a civil case. Of course, we can easily have different rules for civil and criminal legal aid.

Arguably, the British rule of costs discourages vexacious claims anyway. For those who don’t know, in the UK the loser pays the winner’s costs (lots of caveats to this, and often they only pay 60-70%), so claimants in civil matters should be discouraged from chancing it because of the cost implication if they lose.

Lastly, I would say that if we want to disallow a certain type of claim for being vexatious, then we should just change the law. Making a more complicated and bureaucratic system to target a few ne’er-do-wells and making everyone’s life harder seems pointless. Especially when you remember that you have to employ extra staff to administer this contribution system.