A child asylum seeker at the gates of the Red Cross refugee centre at Sangatte near Calais. Photograph: Sean Dempsey/PAHere we go again. Barely one year after Refugee and Migrant Justice (RMJ) was forced to close its doors on some 10,000 asylum seekers, the largest remaining charity Immigration Advisory Service (IAS) has called in the administrators, threatening the jobs of some 250 case workers in 14 branches and leaving more vulnerable clients in the lurch.
"We know from our daily contact with asylum seekers how important this support is for them as they make their case for protection," commented Donna Covey, chief executive of the Refugee Council. "After the sad loss of RMJ last year, this news from the IAS is hugely significant and very worrying. Our clients already struggle to find good quality legal representation; this development will only add to their difficulties."
You can read Steve Medley's account of how the service's closure might impact upon some of the most vulnerable members of society. I have written about RMJ's closure and the anger felt by ex-RMJ staff that clients were abandoned to uncertain fates.
Not surprisingly IAS staff are deeply anxious about their own but also their clients' futures. "These files are people's lives and they are sitting there on desks and shelves," a caseworker in Manchester tells me. She reports that staff wanted to work on urgent cases on a pro bono basis after the weekend, explaining, "We do asylum work. Sometimes this is life and death." She claims she was told to stop working immediately by the administrators and was not allowed to refer clients elsewhere. "I just told them to fuck off."
The big picture here is that ministers are looking to remove immigration from the legal aid scheme (except asylum claims or where the individual is detained) as part of plans to remove ?350m from the ?2.2bn budget. Clearly, IAS couldn't have survived that without redundancies.
But this shocking and now familiar story illustrates just how precarious the legal advice sector is. The Legal Services Commission, which funds the legal aid scheme, insists that IAS's decision to go into administration was "theirs alone".
The Commission raised "concerns around financial management and claims irregularities which prompted IAS trustees to conclude that the organisation was no longer financially viable", says a spokesman. According to an LSC source this included claiming for "files where they were unable to prove that people were eligible for legal aid and cases that were not within the scope of legal aid".
A letter to the Guardian, with many IAS staff among the 94 signatories, accuses the LSC of deploying "a smokescreen of financial irregularities" to close the service, "leaving those most in need of legal aid without representation and sacking low-paid staff". The anonymous Manchester caseworker concedes there is "blame on both sides" and argues that the LSC's fixed fee regime was "death by a thousand cuts".
The economics of legal aid might not make a gripping read but the notion of access to justice, increasingly unraveling under the present government, rests on the financial viability of the sector. So here goes.
I spoke to Sheona York, IAS's principal legal officer, this week. She joined IAS in January 2009 after 29 years at the Hammersmith and Fulham Law Centre, three months before the RMJ and IAS moved on to the same legal aid contract as the rest of the sector. Their payment structure moved from hourly rates to fixed fees - ?495 for an asylum case and ?260 for immigration. This roughlt translates to 11 and five hours' work respectively for the first stage of a case.
York recalled warning trustees at her first board meeting at IAS that the impact would be "cataclysmic".
"Imagine meeting someone, learning their entire life history, obtaining legal documents, researching the political situation of their country - you can't obtain that amount of information and write proper legal arguments in that time."
IAS, RMJ and others found that most cases cost two and a half times the fixed fee: not enough to be viable and yet not sufficiently high for advisers to invoke the upper limit (three times the fee) which takes cases outside the fixed fee system. "From a business point of view it was a straightforward recipe for disaster," York reckons. The losses hit RMJ first, as their work was predominantly asylum cases, York explains.
At the same time as IAS was facing "an assault upon its business model — effectively a cut of 15% on the hourly rates". York and other senior lawyers were charged with improving the quality of IAS legal work across the whole organisation. This consisted of replacing what she calls the "advice centre" style of basic advice and straightforward applications, where only a few experienced caseworkers handled higher appeals, with "a more subtle and complete understanding of clients' cases" and "a determined use of the law to defend their rights".
"Our caseworkers were committed and some groundbreaking legal work done. But in terms of my own role, I can say we did not succeed. Not least because of the new fee structure. There were financial losses and business decisions needed to be taken to stem those losses; it all took too long." She describes the mood after RMJ's closure as "just desperate".
So what about the IAS clients? The LSC says their priority is to "work closely with IAS and the administrators to ensure clients of IAS continue to get the help they need while safeguarding public money". York reports that the IAS has been told that the LSC has agreed to fund transition work.
Once legal aid rates are slashed by 10%, as the coalition government plans, York argues it will be "even harder and clients will suffer injustice, hardship and even loss of life". She continues, "It is hoped that the lessons of the RMJ closure have been learned. But fundamentally, I don't believe a proper service can be provided for clients on that legal aid regime alone."
Jon Robins is a freelance journalist and director of the research company Jures, which is running the Justice Gap series
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