Are you worried about the Legal Aid, Sentencing and Punishment of Offenders Bill?

Whilst there has been a lot of focus on Ken Clark’s comments on rape and Cameron’s decision to take a U-Turn on the guilty plea policy, ALAC feels that we as a nation must wake up to the threat of the impending legal aid cuts.

That might sound overly dramatic. Then again, taking away some people’s right to a free solicitor upon arrest is pretty serious.

The UK must pay attention to the way the government is rushing the legal aid bill through Parliament. Otherwise we will find that carers aren’t entitled to aid in challenging decisions to take away their meagre allowance.  Or families at the mercy of a dodgy landlord can’t get legal aid until crisis point.

Birmingham alone is estimated to lose over £1.1m in legal aid funds.

Will we as a nation just shrug our shoulders over the next few months? ALAC hopes not.

Read more and take action now:

 -Contact your MP using writetothem.com

-Join the Justice for All campaign http://www.justice-for-all.org.uk/join-us

-Follow us on Twitter @alacbirmingham plus excellent work of @ilegal

-Participate in the scrutiny of this bill by submitting your evidence to the House of Commons Public Bill Committee – find out how by clicking on the link

-See the article from the Guardian on this by following this link 

http://www.guardian.co.uk/law/2011/jun/28/supreme-court-judge-legal-aid

“"Courts are, and should be, a last resort, but they should be a last resort which is accessible to all, rich and poor alike.” – Lady Hale of the Supreme Court, who is against the cuts

Birmingham Against The Cuts March for Justice 2011

On Friday 3rd June, Justice for All organised a march against the financial cuts to numerous services across Birmingham and in particular against cuts to legal aid provision.

Led through the city centre with Jack Dromey MP for Erdington leading the march we congregated at Bull Street outside the Minories Shopping Centre

down Temple Row,

into Cherry Street and across Corporation Street

to Union Street,

down High Street,

and New Street

to Chamberlain and Victoria Square

  The entire group then went into the Council House from Victoria Square

Where in one of the meeting rooms we congregated, along with Yvonne Davies of Birmingham CAB and the leaders of the Justice for All campaign to talk about and discuss the cuts, their impact and why we are opposed to them.  Below is a picture of Jack Dromey MP receiving the petition after having given an inspirational talk on the matter in hand.  It was a real pleasure to have an MP of his calibre speak at the event and that his words resonated with everyone in the room.

ALAC 3rd blog post and blogspot overhaul

So!!! As you will see we’ve had a much needed change to the look of the blog. I hope you like!

In this issue: - 

1.  Contribution to the cause – Lord Hunt
2. Twitter Following
3. Linking with iLegal

Contribution to the cause – Lord Hunt

ALAC managed to secure a meeting with Lord Hunt aided by the assistance of Lisa Trickett, Director of Knowledge Transfer at Birmingham Business School and UpRisings’ Project Leader Zehra Zaidi. This took place at The Bond, Wednesday 6th April after a pre-meeting meeting over the road at the Fazeley Studios. In the pre-meet we agreed on a five point agenda as follows: -

1. Introduce ourselves
2. Introduce the Social Action Project (SAP)
3. The government consultation and our response
4. Assessment of our future direction
5. Subsequent meeting

Zehra attended to help administer the meeting and also on behalf of the UpRising program. Dan cited the CAB figures demonstrating the easing affect legal aid has and we concurred that in essence the cuts would likely be financially counter-productive. We shared our concerns on the loss of experienced specialists within all the various support structures losing funding. How it may be that when they’re gone and in two years when funding comes back they would not return. We expressed our expectations on how the government would react, recalling the EMA cuts and how they returned with a reduction. We focused on promoting a solution, engaging with the local public and professional community, publicising the campaign and arranging an event. It was a real pleasure to meet him and ALAC are very thankful for his insight and support. Following this he has posed two Parliamentary questions on behalf of ALAC. These can be found via the following link:


http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/ld/ldcumlst.htm

We are extremely honored to have this happen, look forward to a written response and a further meeting with Lord Hunt.

Twitter Following

Look at our esteemed Twitter following!! OMG! BCC West Midlands Politics show, Justice For All, Sound Off For Justice, Birmingham Feminists, CAB, the MoJ, Jon Snow of C4, Nick Clegg, and too many MPs and Councillors to mention – plus some edge; WikiLeaks :-O thanks to all for the support!!!

Linking with iLegal

iLegal (also following us on Twitter), has uploaded our consultation response as a public download on their site. See the link below

http://downloads.ilegal.org.uk/Responses/response_alac.pdf

iLegal is a great source and force for the culmination of people’s responses and current news on relating matters; really worth checking out.

Soon to follow will be a bio of each of the six team members and a bit of coverage on the annual 10k legal walk. Thanks for reading and watch this space!

Thomas Carter

Long overdue second post!

Hi again!


Well it's been 6 1/2 weeks since the consultation responses went in and I think it's fair to say that the figures were substantial even though despite a bit of searching there still appears to be no exact figure on the number received by the MoJ.  Jonathan Djanogly (Parliamentary Under Secretary of State (HM Courts Service and Legal Aid), Justice; Huntingdon, Conservative), has been quoted to have said "about 5000" in the Justice Committees' session on 16th February and still managed to avoid giving an accurate response to Andy Slaughters' (Hammersmith, Labour), questions on 28th February.  


It's been quite amazing to see social interactive media taking a forefront on reporting the important issues as usual to the people who are already with their heads in the game.  The newspapers have given little in terms of up-to-date coverage and have either failed entirely to bring this important issue to light or have lagged so far behind that they have indeed been releasing dead, old news.  However it's not too late for them to pick up the pace.


Earlier in March three of the team attended a meeting with Claire Bassett (CEO for the Criminal Cases Review Commission), to discuss our progress so far, our aims, methods and final goals.  It was then the idea that instead of purely opposing the cuts, becoming 'one of many' and loosing what is quite an individual identity we should set our sights on developing a support structure that we as a team will eventually be able to step back from and watch it run itself.  This body of support will be focused on those disproportionately affected by the proposed cuts in Birmingham and we hope to get Pro Bono practitioners, advisors and more involved in the successful implementation and running of this.


Since then we have been attending numerous visits, learning sessions, meetings so on and so forth both off our own backs and through the UpRising Programme.  We plan to meet with an important peer very soon who shall momentarily remain nameless but who may lend substantial credibility to our project and it's purpose.


Please get in contact if there's anything you would like to suggest or comment on in the blog or in regards to the proposed cuts.  Our Email address is alacbirmingham@gmail.com , you can follow us via twitter: http://twitter.com/alacbirmingham and befriend the facebook group: ALAC (Against Legal Aid Cuts).


Two shout outs: - Please pay a visit to http://www.justice-for-all.org.uk/ and sign up!!!  The site's full of true stories and useful information on what's going on.  Thanks also to Barpa Langass for the comment on the first post which led me to http://ilegal.org.uk/index.cgi?board=responses , a group and site dedicated to the cause.


Keep following the campaign trail and make some noise!


Thomas Carter

First Blog Post!

Hello and welcome to ALAC's blogger.com page!

Please see the about us section explaining a little about who we are as an organisation.  Brief individual Bios on each member are due to follow shortly.

Below is the link to our response to the Government's consultation paper for Legal Aid Cuts.  Following approval by the manager of Chelmsley Citizen's Advice Bureau on 14th February 2011 we were very happy that this was sent as a joint response from Chelmsley CAB and ALAC.

https://docs.google.com/viewer?a=v&pid=explorer&chrome=true&srcid=0B3391Sc6jo5iNDA2NTEyOWQtY2M0OS00ZWNmLTk1Y2MtOGU2MzcxODQ2ZTI2&hl=en&authkey=CIKQ_M4M&pli=1

We are not clear right now on the exact number of responses the Government received to the consultation paper but there were many.  We are not alone and we wait with baited breath for the Government's reactions to the responses.

Further updates to come!

Thomas Carter