About the civil simplification project
The Board has a civil simplification project underway and its primary aim is to reduce the complexity of the civil legal assistance process.
We know some solicitors find the process complex and have difficulty meeting the legislative requirements and complying with our policies and guidance. Some applicants have difficulty providing the documentation we need for the financial assessment and find the forms difficult to complete. Opponents also find the financial assessment difficult to understand when they try to make representations on financial grounds about an application for legal aid.
We are therefore engaged in a major review of our processes and forms to analyse what causes problems so that we can take remedial steps to improve systems and processes, produce better guidance and/or identify possible changes to legislation. There are certain changes – for example, to forms – that we can make: however, other changes might need changes to legislation. One of our functions is to advise Ministers and to make recommendations for changes to legislation; however, we have no direct control over what will be introduced or when that might take place. A key factor in this work is using new technologies: in particular, developing online systems to simplify and speed up the processing of applications and accounts.
The civil simplification project was launched back in October 2006 at the Joint Legal Aid Conference. Shortly afterwards we began a consultation phase which included focus group meetings with solicitors and a survey of applicants and opponents. We identified a number of areas to work on and since then we have introduced a number of changes to help simplify aspects of civil legal assistance.
We are currently working on significant changes and we will be phasing these in. The first stage will be introduced in March 2009. Click on the links below to get details of the broad changes to be made in each phase.
PHASE 1 – March 2009
- new civil application forms
- stage reporting
- civil online systems and
- proposals for road shows for the profession
PHASE 2 – Implementation due around the summer of 2009
- improving the way we assess financial eligibility
- better arrangements for dealing with special urgency cases
- Supplier support pilot study
PHASE 3 – Work still to start
- Review of payment of money (in cases where property is recovered) into the Fund
- Review of interfaces across advice and assistance and civil legal aid.
TAPERING IN FINANCIAL ELIGIBILITY
At the legal aid conference on 7 November 2008 the Cabinet Secretary for Justice announced that the upper eligibility limit for civil legal aid would be lifted to £25,000 from April 2009, alongside the introduction of a tapered system of contributions.
For more information about the simplification project, please contact Derek Arthur, Simplification Manager, on 0131 240 2069 or at arthurde@slab.org.uk.
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