The Lord Chancellor, the Rt Hon. Ken Clarke QC MP gave a surprisingly frank interview to Law in Action this week. It’s available on the BBC iplayer, here, for the moment and is very much worth 30 mins of your time. The questions on legal aid and, in particular, housing and legal aid are rather short on specifics, but it’s clear that the direction of travel is to remove more areas of law from the scope of legal aid (family law in particular) and to alter the eligibility thresholds.
If you’ve got a spare 30 mins
Posted in: Housing law - All | Various (non-housing)
J is a barrister. He considers housing law to be the single greatest kind of law known to humankind and finds it very odd that so few people share this view.
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Thanks for the link. He did not say much, if anything really, about housing though.
I think he is right though in saying that sometimes adversarial action is not the best solution. Unfortunately so far as landlords repossessing property is concerned, there is no alternative.
No, every time someone asked for a specific area of law that would suffer legal aid cuts he ducked the question. Entirely understandable, given that another legal aid review is in the offing.
The comments on both prison policy and alternatives to the adversarial system were very interesting though. Like you, I don’t see how possession claims can be made less adversarial (“I want my property back” / “I want to stay” isn’t really something you can mediate!)
If you’re likely to miss the 7 day iPlayer cut off, Law in Action is available as a podcast here:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/podcasts/series/law