Lawyer Monthly - December 2021 Edition

42 WWW.LAWYER-MONTHLY.COM | DEC 2021 THE LEGAL AID CRISIS AND WHY IT MATTERS pay for counselling for our lawyers due to secondary trauma. How can charitable groups and pro bono support from lawyers help to bridge the gap by providing legal advice to the underserved? What are the limits of this? At Access Social Care, we are helping citizens understand that they should be fighting for the right to legal representation to enforce their rights, whilst working hard to try to grow our legal team so that we can reach more people. Our in-house team and network of lawyers give pro-bono advice and casework support when things go wrong. We have recently developed an automated legal information chatbot to increase our reach, and we are harvesting data to take an evidence-based approach to influencing at a local and national level. The failure of the government to properly invest in legal aid for community care cases means that the rule of law is broken for many people in society who need it the most. Charities like Access Social Care will never be able to meet the tsunami of need. One of the most important things we can do is shine a light on that gap, with a view to changing the system and seeking greater investment in legal aid in the longer term. Can you tell us about your own experiences of providing pro bono advice when legal aid has fallen short? The case that sticks with me is related to a 16-year-old girl with autism. Years of social services failures led to her behaviour becoming violent. She did not have a mental health condition, but she was sectioned. Placed far away from home, she was overmedicated, unlawfully restrained, treated like an animal – staff would knock on a door on one side of her cell and push food through a hatch on the other. Her distraught parents were not allowed into the room and communicated with her through a tiny window. After two years of inhumane treatment, she started to self-harm, hallucinate and have seizures. The hospital refused access to a specialist clinician, citing safety concerns. Outraged, her father posted what was happening to his daughter on social media. Exposed, the local authority sought a gagging order claiming the father was abusing his daughter’s right to privacy. The father was refused legal aid but our lawyers and two brilliant barristers working pro-bono were able to support the family. The case was thrown out, a costs order was made against the council and after a long fight the daughter was freed and now lives happily in the community. The government recognises that mental health settings are not suitable for people with a learning disability and/or autism and challenging behaviour, but there are over 2000 adults and 200 children inappropriately placed in these units across the country. The UN has cited this as being one of the most egregious human rights abuses in the UK - and families still struggle to access legal aid to support them. Without legal aid to facilitate access to justice, the rights of many disabled and older people might as well not exist.