Immigration: Home Office needs to simply system
Poor-quality immigration legal aid work is having “devastating consequences” for clients and shifting an “enormous – and often unmet – burden” onto the wider non-profit advice sector, a report has found.
It said bodies that regulate legally aided immigration work, such as the Solicitors Regulation Authority (SRA) and Legal Aid Agency (LAA), were “frequently cited” by lawyers and clients as “causes of confusion or indeed conflict rather than support”, in ensuring good-quality representation.
Frances Timberlake, access to justice organiser at charity Migrants Organise and author of the report Threadbare: The Quality of [1] Immigratio [1]n [1] Legal Aid [1], said a “notably low” number of people mentioned regulatory standards, whether those of the SRA or the LAA, as defining good quality.
“Indeed, many respondents noted feeling confused by different regulatory standards and bodies, and several providers mentioned being unsure of how to meet different standards and where they differed from each other.
“Those who had accessed legal aid had next to no knowledge of how legal aid was regulated and what to do if they had concerns about the quality of their representative’s work.”
A solicitor at a law centre commented in the report: “As advisers, we have to do so much work to go through the quality markers of different bodies – there is very complex, unclear and inaccessible information.
“It’s not clear how you meet the quality requirements of OISC [the Office of the Immigration Services Commissioner, now called [2] the Immigration Advice Authority], the Law Society, the SRA and the LAA, and what you have to do to meet your professional obligations under all of them.”
All the respondents who referred specifically to the SRA, whether legal aid providers or referral charities, “felt that its main failing lay in the detection of breaches and enforcement”.
Ms Timberlake said this was partly because of “unaddressed barriers to making complaints”, poor follow-up to complaints and lack of engagement with people accessing legal aid services.
“This was noted by several respondents to be in contrast to the Bar Standards Board’s standards, which were perceived to be both higher and better enforced.”
“Many individuals” did not know about their lawyers’ complaints process or that it was possible to complain to the SRA or Legal Ombudsman.
Research for the report from Migrants Organise was carried out jointly with Haringey Migrant Support Centre, the No Accommodation Network, Refugee Action, and South London Refugee Association.
They interviewed 46 people from 20 organisations last year, including legal aid lawyers, regulated immigration advisers and people who had used legal aid services when going through the immigration system.
Ms Timberlake said communication was a “central element” of good-quality representation but 86% of respondents spoke of “poor or absent communication” from a lawyer being a problem for them or their clients.
Examples cited by clients included dishonest lawyers wrongly telling them they were not eligible for legal aid and making them pay, and not knowing who their lawyer was and having to rely instead on case updates from their interpreter.
Some also did not inform clients of their rights and entitlements, for example to a family reunion after being granted asylum.
“Very few people” who obtained legal aid felt that they had “a mutually trusting relationship” with their lawyer, a situation made worse when the lawyer was far away and in-person meetings were not offered or possible.
Ms Timberlake said 92% of interview participants stated that a primary cause of poor quality was a “generalised lack of capacity among legal aid providers to take on new work and to fully support someone through their case”.
On poor working conditions, one director of a law centre commented: “We have a fly infestation in the office and we pay rubbish salaries – we can offer so little to our staff beyond basic care and wellbeing, which even then are taken away from us by the lack of funds simply for a decent office.”
The report recommended that the Ministry of Justice “overhaul the current legal aid system to ensure providers are properly paid for their work and rewarded for high quality of service”.
In the short term, there needed to be “a significant injection of funding into legal aid in order for high quality work and the prioritisation of client care and staff care to be financially viable” for providers.
Ms Timberlake said the £20m uplift [3] in pay for immigration, housing and benefits legal aid work over the next four years, announced by the government in November, was “insufficient and does not reflect the loss providers have made since the rates were last increased in 1996”. Fixed-fee schemes should be abolished in favour of hourly rates, she added.
The report recommended that the SRA introduce a “minimum required level of communication with clients and an expectation that documentation is translated into their own language”, along with ensuring that information about complaints was accessible and complaints were followed up.
Meanwhile, the Home Office “should commit to simplifying the immigration system so that individuals can navigate it without ongoing reliance on legal aid services”.
Ms Timberlake added that this year alone Migrants Organise had made 438 referrals to legal aid services, but only nine had been accepted.