Young Legal Aid Lawyers Birgitte Hagem and Laura Janes explain how changes to legal aid would seriously affect victims of trafficking and exploitation...

Budget cuts are being made across the board, however, proposed legal aid cuts, which are currently going through Parliament in the form of the Legal Aid, Sentencing and Punishment of Offenders Bill, would not necessarily save money in the long term and would severely impact the most vulnerable within our society – victims of trafficking and exploitation included.

At a time when all services are forced to cut corners, it is more essential than ever that access to justice remains for the most vulnerable to enforce their rights.

As a lawyer who specialises in representing children in prison, Laura Janes has worked with several young people who have become caught up in the criminal justice system as a result of exploitation and trafficking.  She recalls how a young victim of exploitation became embroiled in cannabis cultivation – the young person ended up in prison, separated from her child, requiring immense assistance to navigate the system and maintain contact with her child.

Victims of trafficking invariably need expert and specialist assistance in a number of areas of law, from criminal defence to prison, immigration, community care and public law, to ensure they are not further victims of the justice and social care systems. This is particularly true when dealing with children. The legal aid cuts would not only remove huge areas from the ambit of legal aid but are likely compromise the quality of service that the remaining lawyers can provide.

The proposed cuts would remove access to advice and representation for large amounts of immigration, family and welfare benefits law. They would also drastically reduce access to community care law.

At the same time, recent actual cuts to funding have had a profound effect on criminal law because providers can be paid a lot less to take on more work. As a consequence, they may struggle to remain in business and to provide a quality service.

The government’s planned cuts in legal aid would particularly affect the ability of children and vulnerable people to obtain advice on what their rights are and how to navigate the legal and bureaucratic systems to obtain them. This is due to two key reasons:

First, a joint study by the Legal Services Research Centre and Youth Access on civil and social justice has shown that young people are more susceptible than other groups to clusters of problems that result in an increase and worsening of law-related issues.

Therefore, removing huge areas of law from legal aid will especially affect young people from all backgrounds. It is estimated that about 200,000 young people under the age of 25 will lose access to justice as a result of these cuts.
 
Second, one of the reasons that young people struggle to obtain advice is the difficulties that they have in locating and approaching a lawyer. The same research found that less that one per cent of advisers and solicitors provided young people as a client group they target.

A Just Right’s briefing, Heading for Trouble, published in November 2011, identified that the availability of advice for young people is declining rapidly, with cuts in 2011/12 alone reducing Connexions services by 40% and leaving 42% of voluntary sector youth advice services at risk of closure.

Victims of trafficking and exploitation often struggle to obtain adequate legal advice as it is: they are more likely to have language difficulties, suffer from the experience of trauma and lack any kind of support system. They are often completely unaware of what duties and rights are owed to them by the state, which is why, without competent legal advice, they will never be able to benefit from equal access to justice.

Unaccompanied children will no longer be able to get legal aid unless they have made an application for asylum. This will affect many child victims of trafficking.  While the government has confirmed that there will be a chance for such children to make a special application for funding, it has already made it clear that the criteria for funding for ‘excluded cases’ will be narrowly drawn.

A further concern is that specialist and quality lawyers who have the necessary expertise to help trafficked children will simply not be able to stay in business under the new legal aid regime.

The government accepts the social and financial benefits of early civil legal advice but has chosen to pursue these cuts in any event.  Ensuring that children are protected and given all the legal assistance they need is not only the morally correct approach but also the financially sensible one.

For more information, visit www.younglegalaidlawyers.org; www.savelegalaid.co.uk; www.justice-for-all.org.uk; www.justrights.org.uk.