Solicitors refuse complex abuse cases in legal aid row

Defence solicitors across Scotland are to refuse to act in summary cases alleging a course of domestic abuse, as part of their campaign for better legal aid rates.

The Scottish Solicitors Bar Association announced today that its members "have taken the difficult, but necessary, decision to refuse to act in summary cases where a contravention of s 1 of the Domestic Abuse (Scotland) Act 2018 is alleged" – the provision aimed at tackling coercive control. 

These offences, the SSBA explained, relate to behaviour over a period of time – perhaps years – and "are inherently complex and involve significantly more work than most summary cases", but only attract the same fee as for a summary case alleging a single punch on a specific date and time.

Given the current "derisory" fees payable for legal aid work, it added that "As a profession, we cannot undertake complex cases for a fixed fee rate which was set decades ago and was never intended to include such complex and lengthy cases."

The SSBA said the Scottish Government had acknowledged in its "Vision for Justice in Scotland 2022", that an effective and efficient legal aid system was vital to ensuring access to justice, but at the same time had "consistently ignored the profession when we alert them to the numbers leaving legal aid work and our struggle to attract and retain experienced lawyers". With newly qualified prosecutors routinely earning upwards of £15,000 per year more than defence solicitors at the same stage, and the Government ignoring warnings that the profession is in crisis, "The action we are taking is a consequence of the Scottish Government’s failure to adequately address these problems."

On Twitter it added: "The SSBA is disappointed to have to announce a further escalation in the ongoing dispute between the criminal bar and @scotgov. None of us want to leave clients unrepresented, but the lack of engagement from [Minister for Community Safety] @AshtenRegan leaves us little choice."

Speaking to the BBC, Ms Regan said: "This is a serious escalation. There are real victims that are going to be impacted by this. So I want to send out that message that the Government is willing to carry on talking to see if we can find a resolution to this."

She claimed that since she had been in post, she had given consistent fee rate rises and had listened to what the profession had said. But while rates have been raised by 3% and then twice by 5% in recent years, solicitors claim that the fixed fee has still dropped by almost half in real terms and it is no longer financially viable to take on complex cases at legal aid rates.