Legal Update: Proposed legal aid policy unlawful

The coalition government has made cuts to legal aid that have dramatically transformed the legal landscape. In April 2013, the assistance, designed 65 years ago to help those who had strong cases but could not afford to pay for a lawyer, was removed from certain areas of the law. These include private family law, social security law, much of housing law, some parts of education law and most of immigration law.

At the time that the changes were debated, parliament deliberated on what areas of law should be protected from cuts and these protected areas were listed in legislation. Protected areas included, for example, judicial review challenges against public bodies acting unlawfully and cases concerning children's special educational needs. However, just after the cuts came into force, the coalition government announced that it planned, through secondary legislation, to bar certain people - including certain children - from receiving legal aid even if their case fell within one of these protected areas. It proposed to do this on the basis of a "residence test", whereby every applicant for civil legal aid would be required to produce documentation to show that, first, they were lawfully resident in the UK, and second, they had been lawfully resident for at least 12 months in the past.