The Gazette 1982

INCORPORATED LAW SOCIETY OF IRELAND

January/February 1982

Vol. 76, No.1

Civil Legal Aid • • • •

Measuring the Cost operated by full-time staff. While this enabled the purse strings to be tightly controlled, at least in so far as concerned the total expenditure on the Scheme, it is clear from the Board's comments that the Scheme, as presently funded, cannot cope with the demand. There is another more disturbing aspect of the statistics and accounts for the year ending 31 st December 1981 which suggests that the cost of the Scheme, on a case basis is excessive. Each application costs some £215, and if it is to be assumed that the 412 cases where the applicants were found not to be eligible and the 931 cases where advice only was given, took up substantially less time and effort than the 407 cases where the applicant was represented in Court, the cost of each case litigated, some three-quarters of which were in the District Court, must have been very high indeed. It would appear that each District Court case may have cost the Scheme well over £300. Even allowing for the "start-up" costs the Scheme already seems to be operating on a very expensive basis. The Law Society was accused, when it sought to have private practitioner involvement in the Scheme, of merely trying to line its members' pockets. In fact the Society's recommendations that the Scheme should be partly centre-based and partly private practitioner-based grew out of a fairly clear understanding of the level of cost of the operation of the sort of bureaucracy which was being set up and of the expense of trying to provide a comprehensive service on a national basis. Regretably there is nothing in the Board's first Annual Report which does not bear out the Society's concern in that regard. 0

• • • • T he approach adopted by the Civil Legal Aid Board to the presentation of its First Report is a refreshing and useful one. Although the Report is described as "Annual Report 1980", it is in fact only the draft accounts and that part of the report dealing with the statistics of cases which are confined to the period ending on 31 st December 1980, and much of the substantive part of the Report is actually given over to developments (or rather lack of developments) which took place during 1981. It is a sad tale of proposals for the expansion of the scheme having to be curtailed by the limitation of the Scheme's Grant-in--Aid to £O.95m. from the requested £1.9m. for the year 1981, followed, (after the Board had reduced its intended expansion to further centres in Dublin, Tralee, Athlone and Dundalk) by a ban on recruitment imposed by the Government on the Public Service in July 1981. The Report argues strenuously for the planned expansion to be permitted, commenting that its experiment with part-time "clinics" in various locations around the country, (serviced only on one or two days a month by staff from an established centre) is not the ideal way to achieve a proper spread of service. It might be said that not all informed outside observers will be surprised at this state of affairs. The conflict between the commitment of all the major political parties to provide a legal aid scheme, and the presumed concern of the Department of Finance that the scheme would not prove to be extremely expensive, was resolved, against the recommendations of the Pringle Committee, by opting for a wholly centre-based scheme,