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Legal Aid

The Minister and Lord Carter have said that access to justice is"““no less a fundamental right than education or healthcare””." The background to the proposals is that they might not be—in the Minister’s words—a cost-cutting exercise, but there is a cost-controlling exercise, in that the legal aid budget during the Labour’s nearly 10 years in office has increased by about a quarter, whereas the budget for education has increased by more than a half, and the budget on health in this country has doubled. Why is the legal service—the third pillar of the welfare state—taking so much of a hit when it starts with a much smaller proportion of public finances in the first place?