Something has gone badly wrong with legal aid in Scotland, and the consequences are being felt in every sheriff court in the country. I’ve watched over the past decade as the system that was once the envy of the United Kingdom has been quietly hollowed out.
The Scottish Legal Aid Board’s budget has been essentially flat since 2010, while the cost of everything else has risen sharply. Solicitors who once did a healthy mix of legal aid and private work have been abandoning publicly funded cases in droves. Who can blame them? The rates haven’t kept pace with inflation, let alone the complexity of modern litigation.
In rural Scotland the situation is particularly acute. Try finding a solicitor who’ll take on a legal aid family case in Dumfries or Wick. You might be waiting months. The Scottish Government has made sympathetic noises, but the funding increases announced last year barely cover the shortfall that already existed.
What concerns me most is the effect on ordinary people. A woman fleeing domestic abuse who needs an interdict. A tenant facing unlawful eviction. A parent fighting for contact with their children. These are the cases that legal aid was created for, and these are the people being failed.
The Law Society of Scotland has been lobbying for reform, and credit to them for persistence. But lobbying alone won’t fix a system that requires fundamental restructuring. We need to ask difficult questions about what access to justice actually means in modern Scotland.
Other jurisdictions have found creative solutions. In the Republic of Ireland, a network of legal advice centres supplements the formal legal aid system. In Scandinavia, public legal services are integrated with social work. Scotland could learn from these models.
The real danger is that we sleepwalk into a two-tier justice system: one for those who can afford lawyers, another for everyone else. In a country that prides itself on fairness and equality, that would be a profound failure.