Abstract
In the great reform agenda of the post-war Labour Government, legal aid and access to justice had a central role, with a reasonable claim to be one of the major delivery mechanisms of the welfare state — not as important as health, education or welfare benefits, but it had its place. The question of the right to a fair trial was exported to Europe through the work of British civil servants in developing the 1953 Convention for the Protection of Human Rights and Fundamental Freedom (later repatriated by Labour in the Human Rights Act 1998). While the Judicare system meant that both criminal and civil legal aid was delivered by the private sector, this is not fatal to the pretensions of access to justice to a place in the core delivery of the social welfare system. The crown jewel of the NHS — the general practitioner service — was similarly delivered by doctors in a contractual relationship with the state, running a private business, normally in premises they owned (and could sell at a profit) and receiving ‘cost rent’ to cover their mortgage payments.1
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Notes
The history is discussed in J. Robbin (2011), Unequal before the Law, Justice Gap Series (London: Solicitor’s Journal).
Tony Blair, Leader of the Opposition, Speaking to the Party of European Socialists’ Congress, Malmo, 6 June 1997.
A. Giddens (1998), The Third Way (Cambridge: Polity Press) p. 45.
A. Giddens (2000), The Third Way and Its Critics (Cambridge: Polity Press) p. 34.
Lord Chancellor’s Department, Conditional Fees: Sharing the Risks of Litigation CP7/99 (London: Lord Chancellor’s Department, September 1999).
While community as used by New Labour is a contested term, the concept of a neighbourhood law centre, staffed by lawyers but managed by local people, chimes with the idea of community promoted by New Labour thinkers such as Julian Le Grand in the early days of the government (discussed in M. Freeden (2003), ‘The Ideology of New Labour’, in A. Chadwick & R. Heffernan (Eds), The New Labour Reader (Cambridge: Polity Press)). Squeezed between Gordon Brown’s commitment to limit public sector spending during the first period of the government and a focus on ‘market solutions’, the possibility of a renaissance for law centres soon faded.
S. Mayson (2006), After Clementi: The Impending Legal Landscape, the College of Law (Legal Services Policy Institute) http://www.thelegaleducationfoundation.org/the-legal-services-institute/, accessed 25 June 2014.
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© 2014 John Peysner
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Peysner, J. (2014). Legal Aid, Conditional Fees and Labour. In: Access to Justice. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137397232_5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137397232_5
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