Press Releases pre-May 2010

The Ministry of Justice (MoJ) and Legal Services Commission (LSC) have today outlined new steps that aim to rebalance the legal aid budget, reduce costs and increase value for money for legal aid in the criminal defence service.

The reforms are outlined within the Government’s response to the consultations on the Advocates Graduated Fees Scheme and Very High Cost Cases (VHCCs) and are designed to sustain the legal aid budget, ensure that we focus criminal legal aid spending effectively and support other measures introduced to address wider issues on controlling public finances.

The reforms are intended to make better use of the criminal legal aid budget and include changes that rationalise payment structures.

The Government has decided not to take the option of a one-off cut of 17.9% to Advocates Graduated Fees.

Instead the reforms include the alternative option consulted on, of a staged reduction over three years of 4.5% each year (a total reduction of 13.5%) in Advocates Graduated Fees, coupled with extending AGFS to cases due to last up to 60 days

The Funding Order to make these changes is being laid before Parliament today.

The first of the staged reductions will come into effect on 27 April 2010, and the extension to 60-day cases on 14 July 2010.

Cases due to last more than 60 days will continue to be contracted under the VHCC arrangements.

Focusing more of the savings on the transfer of VHCC cases to the Advocates Graduated Fees Scheme will reduce the impact on more junior advocates, who are less likely to be undertaking work on the more complex cases. This approach also allows a lesser reduction in AGFS and to phase that reduction over three years – which will give advocates more time to adjust to the changes.

As the Litigators Graduated Fees Scheme was introduced relatively recently, and is subject to review, the Government has decided not to extend it to cover cases with trial estimates of 60 days at this stage.

The LSC will continue to collect further data on recently concluded VHCCs to help inform the current post-implementation review of the Litigators Scheme. The LSC is consulting on proposals to introduce individual case contracting arrangements for VHCCs.

Today’s reforms to advocates graduated fees and VHCCs support other recent measures introduced to rebalance the criminal legal aid budget including reforms to contain the costs of legal aid representation at police stations, ending the current fee arrangement that remunerate litigators for preparation for committal hearings, and ending the anomaly by which practitioners in criminal cases receive a fee for file reviews which does not apply in civil cases.

Notes to editors

Click here to view the consultation response.

VHCCs are the most complex and expensive cases, usually taking years to reach court. Last year, there were about 400 defendants funded by legal aid in 100 VHCCs. Defence teams are typically paid around £300,000 for such cases but costs in some, such as the Jubilee Line Fraud case, have run into several millions.

To put this in context, last year the LSC funded advice and representation for nearly 1.6m defendants. About 120,000 of these were in Crown Court cases.

The cost of VHCCs was approximately 10% of the criminal legal aid budget. VHCC Crime expenditure was £112m out of total legal aid expenditure of £1.2bn for criminal representation.

Click here for full details of the Advocates’ Graduated Fee scheme.
Click here for full details of the Litigators’ Graduated Fee scheme.