"It's Legal Aid, Jim, But Not As We Know It."

A month ago, the government announced plans to wipe £350m off the legal aid budget and if carried through, over 500,000 of the most vulnerable members of our society will no longer have access to justice. That's 25% of those currently able to do so, denied the democratic right first outlined in Magna Carta eight hundred years ago: 'we will not deny or defer to any man either justice or right'.

By any measure this will be an extraordinary challenge to a legal aid system that has successfully protected the rights of tens of millions of people over the past 60 years. Yet, as against the projected impact of the increases in university fees, the response of the legal profession so far has been somewhat muted. This may prove short sighted. There is a growing consensus that the reductions in legal aid will force non legal aid practices to take on a much increased pro-bono workload.¹ The point has also been made that effective legal aid was the price for the continuing