Earlier this week, the Justice Secretary Chris Grayling unveiled proposed changes to the law that he hopes will eliminate a “number of weak judicial review cases” by charging people to bring them.
Under the proposals people would have to pay the costs of preparing a case for review until it is accepted by a court, at which time, legal aid will pick up the bill. If the case is not accepted by a court, the individual will have to pay costs for both sides.
The proposed changes are being brought because currently anyone can claim legal aid to fund a judicial review before it has been accepted by the High Court, and last year around 845 cases were brought but then refused permission to proceed, costing hundreds of thousands of pounds.
The measure is part of a raft of proposals to claw back money from spending on legal aid, which costs the country around £1.7bn a year. Another way of doing so is to ban foreign migrants from obtaining legal aid for civil claims until they have lived in the country for at least a year.
The savings, aimed at reducing the legal aid bill by £220m annually by 2018, will also for the first time introduce competitive tendering among solicitors’ firms for contracts to represent defendants in police stations and magistrates courts.
All of the changes were set out in a Ministry of Justice consultation paper, which is open for responses from interested parties until midnight on Tuesday 4 June.