There are some useful stat's on who shares the £2 billion spent on legal aid in today's Daily Mail.
According to the legal profession - and some of the people whose representation was paid for by Legal Aid - Legal Aid is vital because it helps people achieve "justice". But then they would say that, wouldn't they?
Now, the whole legal system in this country only has tangentially to do with some notions of "fairness" or "justice". In practice it is there to protect the wealthy and to provide lawyers with a ready source of income - there's no point being a tip top commercial lawyer drafting business contracts if there is no court system to enforce it. By analogy, if there were no organised football league, you wouldn't be able to earn money by playing football.
It is, for example, perfectly easy to imagine a system where there are no commercial courts to enforce business contracts. Businesses would either behave fairly to their employees and customers and compensate them where appropriate in order to preserve their goodwill and reputation or they would go out of business fairly quickly.
Apparently, it is not the done thing in Japan for large companies to sue each other for breach of contract (and apparently they don't even bother having detailed contracts in the first place), either they settle out of court or the injured party just refuses to deal with the other party ever again. Word soon gets around who's dealing honourably and who isn't.
And the whole criminal justice thing is a bit of a joke as punishments seem to be inversely proportional to the severity of the crime committed and all this Human Rights malarkey has gone way too far.
So the legal profession as a whole is one massive great rent-seeking enterprise, and the £2 billion Legal Aid they receive is just another subsidy on top. To ensure that outsiders don't grab a slice, entry to the profession is of course strictly regulated and restricted and there is a heck of a lot of nepotism.
As readers ought to be aware by now, I'm against all rent-seeking and subsidy payments and I'm also against taxes on output, employment and earned income, but a tax on rental income (like the bulk of the income of the legal profession) merely serves to claw back some of those subsidies.
So here's a bright idea - the total turnover/gross income of legal services is said to be £26.8 billion a year, so if the lawyers decide that £2 billion or £3 billion should be spent on Legal Aid each year, we could fund that with a flat tax of about ten per cent on their gross income and the problem sorts itself out. There's no reason we can't fund the entire court system with such a tax, to be honest, it's like making footballers pay for the upkeep of the football grounds out of their own wages (which ultimately they do).
It isn't far enough
3 hours ago
11 comments:
The other side of the coin is: how to make legal aid a universal benefit?
(Do I have to declare an interest?)
There are a number of issues here;
1. legal aid, is predominently a system of paying for representation when HMG comes knocking saying you have done something it does not like.
Things like Personal injury, Libel and most other civil litigation funding was privatised by the last labour government via the introduction of the conditiional fee agreement (i.e. your lawyer gets to charge a percentage uplift on his costs which he claims as a financial loss from the otherside if you win your case, this will tend to 100%).
This is all under change by the jackson reforms which have been crafted by a Judge and which attempt to reduce costs by compelling lawyers to attend more interim hearings and to fill in yet more tedious court questionnaires that nobody will actually ever look at. I imagine the very simplest reader can see some fault with this approach.
2. You don't have to use lawyers. You can have a flick through the relatively simple modern laws (which most people have an interaction with, i.e. sale of goods) on the books and the nice Civil procedure rules and deal with things yourself. The reason you might not is because it is quite boring and you can just pay someone to do it for you.
3. The issue on entry to the profession is spot on, we have in effect a guild of solicitors and a guild or barristers. You need to slog through Uni then you need to slog through a laughable sort of vocational Uni course for a year (LPC or BVC) and then you need to get yourself onto a 2 year apprenticship which can only be given by an approved firm. There are also various bits of legislation guaranteeing a minimum level of pay and such. There is no reason why people should not just do a law degree and then declare themselves to be solicitors. Joe public can decide whether he wants a spotty youth or a battlehardened god killer without the various stages above.
4. Serious problems arise when people say things like "ah well it is common sense" and they are dealing with expensive items, serious problems which are easily remedied by people just scribbling down "car means the red one" "price means £10,000 to be paid in 10 installments of £1000 each due on the 1st of the months starting on 1 june".
5. Serious problems arise when people use ambiguious terms like "falls due on 5 June" instead of "must be recieved by 4 pm on 5 June".
6. Whether the courts, and indeed state run courts are the correct forum for resolving disputes is open to debate, in effect we currently have a private court system in the form or arbitration but to some extent that probably relies on having an armed court service to back it up
ah piss, I sort of when off on one.
I should also proofread!
Kj, it's easy to make anything a universal benefit. It is certianly easier than means-testing.
Anybody - rich or poor - can ring the police to report a crime for free, and hopefully the police will chase after the baddy and catch him. The 'taxpayer' pays for all this, it's a universal benefit.
SK, those are all valid points, I could quibble with one or the other at great length, but fair enough. I was actually just talking about how to fund Legal Aid.
I suppose you could bring a criminal version of the no win no fee agreement (or modify the pay scale used in employment cases where claimant's costs are not recoverable), in that if the state doesn't manage to bang you up it pays your legal fees plus maybe 25%uplift to encourage criminal sols to take on some risky, but not too risky defences?
In theory only serious prosecutions would come to trial then?
Might need some more thought though
SK, the no-win-no-fee system has its attractions but does not address the issue that lawyers are largely rent-seeking. They didn't suffer the injury and they don't enforce the payment by the wrong-doer. They just cream off the middle bit.
I'm not sure no-win-no-fee is really relevant to criminal cases. I see no harm in having the defence funded by Legal Aid up to a certain basic daily rate or scale, and then let the legal profession decide what the actual rates are and let them pay for it.
And surely it is a basic principle that guilty parties have legal representation?
Under no-win-no-fee, nobody would take them on, and/or, if they were found guilty (and sometimes innocent people are found guilty), they'd get their usual punishment (quite rightly) and have the extra 'punishment' of a massive legal bill which most of them would be unable to pay off anyway.
To be honest, lots of companies work without contracts. A lot of my work is done with a phone call and an email - someone calls me, asks for something, we get it written down in an email and I start.
Yes, it's riskier than having iron clad contracts, and twice I've had to set credit controllers on people and got about half the money, but it's far cheaper than paying for lawyers overall.
On top of that, my clients are happier and return to me. If we draw up a screen design and they call me back after it's built saying "we really wanted that in a brighter blue", I could spend an hour arguing about what's in the contract about the blue, or half an hour changing it to a brighter blue, delighting them in the process and leaving them with a warm fuzzy feeling.
TS, we are getting way off the topic of Legal Aid, but yes, exactly.
But if there were no court system there'd be no credit controllers either.
So if you are working for a company you don't know or trust, you demand payment up front, and they of course demand to see results first and so you end up with stage payments every week or something and you keep them informed of how you are getting along.
If at any stage one party is unhappy with things, the relationship is terminated.
Mark, I rather think that it was like that before we had a surplus of lawyers encouraging people to rush to court for the slightest thing, and that this is fairly recent, i.e. in the last 20 years.
B, what was like what?
Even twenty years ago, lawyers were rent seekers and a closed shop, they always have been by definition.
And perhaps people's standards have dropped as well, so they are more likely to behave like shits (thus causing others to want to sue them) and also more likely to sue (rather than taking the loss on the chin like a gentleman).
But the judges couldn't give a shit either, for them, presiding over a court case is entertainment like watching Jeremy Kyle only with the real power to decide whom to reward and whom to punish, usually for no reason whatsoever apart from personal prejudice.
"Even twenty years ago, lawyers were rent seekers and a closed shop, they always have been by definition. "
Indeed, they have been as long as there have been lawyers. What I meant was that ISTR that many fewer people resorted to the law 20 years ago, possibly because of two things: "No win no fee" wasn't allowed and lawyers didn't (couldn't?) advertise. Going to court was looked on as a last resort. Then the legal profession came all over American and started doing silly things like putting adverts in magazines encouraging children to sue their parents, who would, they said, be able to claim the damages on their household insurance (I kid you not).
I don't think people's standards have dropped, it's just as a result of the above changes in the legal profession, people are much more inclined (and able) to rush to litigation and thus less likely settle the dispute with a fist to the face, or some other ancient remedy.
Post a Comment