A sense of their diversity can be obtained from one random day in January, when 63 people were advised at Bolton. According to the notes made by advisers, they included: a family with two children under the age of four years old who lost their benefits (‘haven’t been able to afford to feed themselves’); a 24-year-old father of two, refused paternity leave and threatened with the sack after his partner suffered a stillbirth with no one to look after the children (partner is ‘currently unable to do so due to pregnancy-related health problems’); an asylum seeker with two children (‘no food and nowhere for her or her children to sleep’); and a young mum, 21 weeks pregnant, who, with her partner, was struggling to pay bills and was ‘very concerned about the baby’s health. Is there anything else they can claim or do?’

Citizens Advice runs on a volunteer army. Of its 28,500 workers, 21,500 are volunteers. It is ‘an absolutely vital part of the “big society”’, David Cameron has said. Yet his government’s proposals will ‘decimate’ Bolton CAB, reckons chief executive Barry Lyons. According to Citizens Advice, more than half of the bureaux it surveyed reckon that the government’s plans ‘pose a real risk’ to their continued operation.

Bolton is an illustration of what’s happening. Two-thirds of its income comes from legal aid. Ministers look determined to slash the £2.1 billion legal aid scheme by £350 million. They are currently consulting on their green paper. Many of the cuts (£279 million) are directed at civil and family advice. This represents a 50 per cent cut in civil legal aid services to the public. And it’s not just legal aid funding that Bolton CAB stands to lose. It has been told to expect a significant cut in its local authority funding (another 15 per cent of its income).

Two-thirds of Bolton CAB’s clients are there because they have debt or welfare benefits problems. Ministers want such cases to be removed from legal aid, dismissing them as ‘generally not of sufficiently high importance to warrant funding’. That shows a shocking disregard for legal aid’s demographic. According to the government’s own impact assessment, legal aid recipients are ‘amongst the most disadvantaged in society … 97 per cent of legal aid recipients were in the bottom two income quintiles with almost 80 per cent in the bottom.’

According to Bolton CAB, out of the 63 people it saw on that one day in January, around ten might receive help if the government’s proposals go ahead. This column is about the experiences of some of the ordinary people who will be affected by that decision.

When I visited Bolton earlier this year, I met ‘Joe’, a 48-year-old former roofer who arrived, as many do, with a shopping bag full of unopened correspondence. ‘I’m worried about the bailiffs,’ he told debt adviser Tracey. His debts – a court fine for unpaid car insurance (£415), an outstanding TV licence payment (£94) – totalled less than £1,000, but they were causing him huge anxiety. He had been in hospital at the weekend having suffered a second heart attack. Eight months previously, a shoulder injury stopped him from working. He was diagnosed with depression, put on medication, signed off sick and in October had his first heart attack. He was right to be anxious. Both the court fine and TV licence are ‘priority debts’ and, as Tracey explained: ‘Creditors don’t tend to mess around.’

Don’t panic, Tracey assured Joe. In less than 20 minutes she sorted out the fine repayment and reinstated a lapsed TV licensing payment scheme over the phone. Joe’s relief was obvious. ‘It’s the stress. The littlest thing just becomes the biggest thing when you feel like this.’ How did it feel to have these problems sorted out? ‘It couldn’t be more important. I can’t afford anything. I can’t afford to pay for advice.’ Citizens Advice reckons that for every £1 that the state invests in its legal help scheme ‘the state potentially saves £8.80’.

Commons testimony

A couple of weeks after Bolton, I was at the House of Commons at an extraordinary event organised by the Haldane Society of Socialist Lawyers and the Young Legal Aid Lawyers and chaired by Michael Mansfield. A series of ordinary people, as well as expert witnesses, gave ‘testimony’ before a distinguished panel of non-lawyers on the value of publicly-funded law.
A woman (‘EP’) told the panel – former Lib Dem MP Evan Harris, the canon of Westminster Abbey, the reverend professor Nicholas Sagovsky and Diana Holland of Unite – how her life and that of her partner and father of their child spiralled out of control as abuse and addiction took grip.

‘Over the next year things were awful. Child protection was working with me and my husband but, because of his drug addiction and my alcohol addiction, we were getting worse. I was so miserable,’ she said. Her husband was a City banker and enjoyed ‘quite a party lifestyle’, complete with a cocaine habit by the time they married in 2002.

He was (in her words) ‘older, very domineering and controlling’ and she was ‘naïve’. EP became withdrawn, spending all her time with their baby daughter. She began to drink heavily. ‘I was just giving up on life. I did not have the energy or the will to try and sort myself out.’

As the marriage fell apart, there was violence on both sides and the police were called. Social services became involved and proceedings to take their daughter into care began. At this point EP realised she need to escape an abusive relationship and approached solicitors. Did she have the money to pay for legal advice? asked Rev Sagovsky. ‘No,’ EP replied. ‘My husband had control of our finances.’

It was one of three testimonies dealing with relationship breakdown. This is significant because ministers propose in its green paper to scrap legal aid for family cases. Ministers insist it will be retained where there is domestic violence. However, there’s a catch. The definition in the green paper is ‘ongoing risk of physical harm’ – and even then it only applies in prescribed circumstances, such as where there is a protective order. As the support group Rights of Women points out, ‘Psychological, financial and emotional abuse are all serious forms of “domestic violence” that can have devastating long-term consequences.’

EP wouldn’t have received legal aid under the government’s proposals. What would that have meant? ‘I probably would have lost both my children and may well still have been an alcoholic and in a violent relationship,’ she said.
As it is, EP hasn’t had a drink for three years, while her husband sorted himself and now lives in Singapore. The couple have ‘an amicable relationship for the sake of the children’.

Both EP and Joe were the lucky beneficiaries of state‑supported advice which, if the government pushes on with its cuts, will be a thing of the past. The justice gap is about to get a lot wider.

The Equal Pay Act 1970 finally came into force under another Labour government on 29 December 1975, with employers having been given the intervening period to adjust to its provisions. For many of them, though, not even 40 years has been enough, and overall the gender pay gap remains a gaping chasm. The Fawcett Society reckons that women working full time earn on average 17 per cent less than men, while part-time women workers earn 37 per cent less. Some of the worst offenders are public sector employers: the public service union Unison is currently representing some 40,000 low-paid women in equal-pay claims.

In April another piece of landmark anti-discrimination legislation entered the statute books. The Equality Bill finally became law in the ‘wash-up’ of bills passed in the dying days of the last parliament, pushed forward by another Labour champion of women’s rights, Harriet Harman. The much-anticipated new legislation was seen as an opportunity to address some of the deficiencies of the earlier law that was struggling to deliver on the promise of its title.

Taking notice

‘Nobody takes any notice of the Equal Pay Act. The simple truth is there’s never enough money,’ says Sue (not her real name), a 53-year-old home care worker. For almost two decades Sue has worked for Cumbria County Council helping the old and vulnerable in their homes. She is one of 1,600 low-paid women to have pursued equal-pay claims against the council through Unison. She recently received more than £30,000 in compensation.

While happy with the pay-out, Sue makes the point that the sum doesn’t represent ‘equal pay’. If there was genuine equality with her male council workers, how much should she have been paid? ‘Double that,’ she reckons, adding that her union had to fight ‘tooth and nail’ on her behalf to get her what she did receive.

Does Sue feel that the Equal Pay Act has made life any fairer? ‘Not really. My feeling is the council gets away with what they can. They know they have a group of women like us, loyal and who want to do their best for the vulnerable in the community, and who are for those reasons unwilling to strike. They take us for granted. We still don’t get paid time-and-a-half or double-time like the mainly male workers whose jobs have been contracted out.’

Although the first equal pay legislation took effect in 1975, it wasn’t until 1995 that legal action by Cleveland ‘dinner ladies’ kick-started a wave of settlements and equal-pay cases being brought through the courts. In the Cleveland case 1,500 women shared a £5 million payout. After that, the 1997 ‘single status agreement’ was constructed to abolish pay inequalities through pay and grading reviews in each local authority. A similar agreement in the NHS called ‘Agenda for Change’ was reached in 2004. But as negotiations dragged on interminably and councils pleaded poverty, women turned to lawyers because they felt their claims were either being stalled or under-settled.

Good business for lawyers

There is no legal aid for cases involving employment tribunals but lawyers took numerous equal-pay cases on ‘no win, no fee’ deals. It proved a lucrative income stream, with lawyers sometimes taking 30 per cent of any payouts – and it was growing fast. In 2003 such cases comprised less than 1 per cent of business dealt with in employment tribunals. Within five years, though, the Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC) was warning that equal-pay cases could ‘crash’ the courts, with as many as 150,000 women entitled to compensation from local authorities and the NHS. The Equal Pay Act was ‘past its sell-by date’, said Trevor Phillips, chairman of the EHRC.

Much of the ire of a coalition of equality campaigners, trade unionists and politicians was directed at Stefan Cross, a Newcastle-based solicitor, who acted for tens of thousands of low-paid women. ‘What he’s doing could mean that industrial relations in this country will be torn up,’ Brian Strutton, a leading official of the 600,000-strong GMB union, told the press. ‘It will be good for lawyers, but millions of people won’t have a union which can represent them.’

By contrast Cross, a former union lawyer who acted for the Cleveland dinner ladies, accused his former comrades of selling out their women members. Speaking to Cross earlier this year, I asked him how he responded to accusations that he was trashing the negotiations between unions and employers by pursuing individual cases in this way. ‘Total tosh,’ he replied, arguing that the ‘fact of the matter’ was that the unions were ‘neglecting their role’.

‘The men get preferential treatment to the women even in the new arrangements,’ he insisted. ‘The women’s interests get sidelined. The trade unions speak with forked tongue on these issues. They claim to espouse issues to do with equality – however, they seek to protect the status quo.’

The appeal judges seemed to agree with Cross, who still acts for 30,000 low-paid women, in a crucial case that came before them in 2008. They upheld an employment tribunal’s finding that the GMB union ‘rushed headlong’ into an ‘ill-considered back-pay deal’ in one case (Allen v GMB) and ‘accepted too readily the council’s plea of poverty’. The judges agreed that the GMB had indirectly discriminated against 26 female workers who had been paid less than their male counterparts when agreeing backdated pay deals. In that case, home carers (a female-dominated job) were on £5.88 an hour whereas a gardener on the same grade (a male-dominated job) was on £8.23 due to a 40 per cent bonus.

Some critics say that statistics measuring the gender gap between men and women are a hopelessly crude measure of progress, not least because they ignore the decision by women to choose lower paid jobs because such roles better suit their lives. The Fawcett Society disagrees, arguing instead that the main reason for the gap is explained by ‘paying women less than men for doing the same jobs or work of equal values’. The other big reasons are what they call the ‘motherhood penalty’ and the undervaluing of traditional ‘women’s work’, such as cleaning, catering and caring.

Problem with the Act

So will the Equality Act narrow the gap? ‘There are measures that will highlight the issues of equal pay but they won’t deal with the systemic problems of equal pay,’ says Unison’s legal director, Bronwyn McKenna. For example, the new legislation will promote transparency and will require public sector bodies with 150 or more staff to publish their gender pay gap and require the same of private and voluntary sector employers with at least 250 employees. ‘So that would leave about 40 per cent of the workforce not covered,’ she notes. It will also ban pay-secrecy clauses which effectively conceal inequality.

‘Our main problem [with the Act] is with the underlying legal framework, which means that cases just run for an inordinately long amount of time,’ says McKenna. ‘There is huge scope for tactical or time-delaying approaches, which the other side is going to throw at you and which you know aren’t going to succeed.’

She points to a recent successful case on behalf of women working with special needs children, care workers and dinner ladies in Sheffield. They claimed that they had not received bonuses that were being paid to their male comparators, street cleaning workers and gardeners, whose basic was 33.3 per cent and 38 per cent respectively higher than their pay. The women’s success this February also reveals the problem. ‘This case has been running for almost a decade,’ McKenna says. ‘There seems to be no limit to the amount of money that the public sector employer is prepared to throw at these cases.’

It was the Attlee government that introduced our system of legal aid in 1949. The architects of the new system decreed that state funding shouldn’t be restricted to those people ‘normally classed as poor’ but should also include those of ‘small or moderate means’.

That scheme is now in danger of being reduced to a minority sink service. Eligibility for legal aid dropped from 80 per cent of the population in Attlee’s day to around two-thirds by the mid-1980s. But the steepest decline has come under New Labour. According to the Ministry of Justice’s latest figures, fewer than one in three of us (29 per cent) now qualify for help. The whole scheme survives on a fixed budget of £2 billion – and even that small sum is too dear for both of the main parties.

Crisis is now endemic to legal aid since a fixed budget was imposed in 1999. Social welfare law – that is, welfare benefits, immigration, employment, housing, discrimination – is having the life squeezed out of it by a spiralling criminal budget. This was an entirely foreseeable consequence of ‘tough on crime and forget about the causes of crime’ government policy and 13 years of relentless law-making (there have been more than 60 new pieces of criminal justice legislation since 1997).

But why should we care? It’s tricky, possibly impossible, defending a public service in these straitened times if it sounds like a charity appeal for lawyers. So instead of legal aid, let’s talk about ‘access to justice’, a notion that covers the ability of people to enforce our rights. This is not a plea to pay lawyers more money – far from it, there is excess in the system and some lawyers are paid way too much. It is a call for better education, more accessible information and, if needs be, easier access to the courts.

Equal access to justice should be regarded as a fundamental democratic right. Promoting it is about making sure we as a society are sufficiently literate about our rights to know when they are being abused and what to do if they are. It’s not about creating a generation of ‘compo crazy’, responsibility-shirking litigants.

But ‘access to justice’ is a hard sell. The Guardian journalist Jonathan Freedland has reflected on the ‘Billy-no-mates’ status of publicly-funded law. Unlike schools or hospitals, legal aid seems ‘technical and remote to all but those who’ve had to use it’, he wrote in 2006.

That’s the point: we don’t appreciate the value of access to decent advice until we need it, and then it’s a life-saver. Where do you go when you are two months behind on your mortgage and your house is being repossessed, when you are made redundant without being told why, or, God forbid, banged up and falsely accused of a crime you didn’t commit?

I recall where I was when I understood that the ‘credit crunch’ was more than the latest irritating journalist cliché – that it was a phenomenon with real, human casualties. It was Dover County Court, one Wednesday morning in mid-April 2008. I was there in a professional capacity, writing an article for the Observer about ‘repossessions day’. District Judge Parnell had 35 cases to get through.

The court was an unprepossessing 1970s concrete block, but the scenario playing out in its waiting room was Dickensian. ‘People often arrive traumatised,’ Jacqui O’Carroll, a Citizens Advice Bureau advisor, told me. Outside the court anxious homeowners struck deals with mortgage company ‘agents’ (often trainee lawyers, instructed to act on the behalf of a company) to either pay back arrears in stages or give up their homes.

‘Homeowners arrive unsure of what’s going on, totally ill-informed, and prepared to lose everything because they think there’s no alternative,’ Jacqui said. The pressure is unbearable ‘especially from the less scrupulous providers who will insist they’ll get possession and even tell homeowners not to bother turning up’.

In Jacqui’s previous session she reckoned she prevented five people losing their homes. The dismal irony was that much of this pain was largely unnecessary. As she explained, borrowers are entitled to repay debts over the remaining period of a mortgage, no matter what lenders tell them. Many homeowners were handing over their keys or signing up to unrealistic repayment schemes for no good reason.

Three months later I was in a call centre in Birmingham for another Observer article (it’s not all glamour, you know). On this occasion I was reporting on the work of the National Debtline, a free helpline taking 500 calls a day. I mention this because although there is a fledgling version of a legal version of the National Debtline, it is under-resourced, under-promoted and under-used. I have often heard from lawyers and advisors that there is no substitute for face-to-face advice. I am not convinced.

As I listened to phone calls, many followed the same pattern. People have been putting off picking up the phone for months but as they talk through their problems anxiety gives away to relief. They realise they can keep their homes, sort their debts and life can return to normal. Sensible advice is followed by referrals to the internet and information packs dispatched in the post. We need a network of advice so that people don’t fall through the gaps and end up in places like Dover County Court signing their homes away to sharks, leading to more misery for themselves and their families and greater cost to society.

Jon Robins is a freelance journalist. www.jonrobins.info