Figures show that homelessness has been increasing year on year since 2010. Lack of legal aid is a lesser known contributory factor. Photo credit: Pixabay/bluesbby. Some rights reserved/CC0.
Legal aid is the neglected arm of the welfare state. At Shelter, we depend on legal aid to advise and represent people facing court actions for possession of their homes or who are homeless but cannot get assistance from their local authority. But as a result of the cuts to legal aid made by The Legal Aid, Sentencing and Punishment of Offenders Act 2013 (‘LASPO’) there are now many housing problems we cannot help with. These changes have led to an increasingly crisis-driven approach to funding housing advice. As a result of LASPO, legal aid is no longer available for the preventative work that can stop a problem becoming a crisis.
An obvious example is the removal of legal aid for welfare benefits, which leaves people to fall through the net until it is too late to rescue their situation. This is despite the fact that such problems are often complex and caused by failing administrative processes, and that they are by their nature likely to affect the most vulnerable people in society. This problem occurs in its starkest form in cases where people have fallen into rent arrears because they have not received their full housing benefit or universal credit entitlement. Where the landlord takes possession action against tenants on the ground of rent arrears, we are often able to obtain an adjournment of the first hearing to buy time to investigate what has gone wrong with the client’s benefits claim. But legal aid is no longer available to fund this work – even though the fact that the tenant is not receiving their benefits entitlement is at the heart of the case. It will be of no avail if by the time of the next hearing there has been no progress in securing payment of benefit and a reduction in rent arrears.
