WE ARE A MAGAZINE ABOUT LAW AND JUSTICE | AND THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN THE TWO
February 07 2025
WE ARE A MAGAZINE ABOUT LAW AND JUSTICE | AND THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN THE TWO

Legal aid crisis: 44% of applicants to Court of Appeal unrepresented

Legal aid crisis: 44% of applicants to Court of Appeal unrepresented

Writing home at HMP Styal. Pic by Andy Aitchison

More than four out of 10 applicants to the Court of Appeal were left to navigate the appeals process without help from a lawyer last year, representing the largest number of litigants against in person since records began in 2016. According to the court‘s review of the year, 44% of conviction applications and 15% a sentence of applications were made by litigant in person compared to 22% of conviction applications and 6% of six sentence applications in 2016.

According to the review, the increase in numbers of unrepresented appellants reflected the coalition government’s 2013 LASPO open (Legal Aid Punishment Of Offenders Act) legal aid cuts as well as a reduction in criminal solicitors and counsel ‘with the capacity and/or willingness to undertake publicly funded work’. Most unrepresented litigants were in custody and, as the review noted, faced ‘additional hurdles’ stressing that digitalisation of the application process did not further disadvantage them

In his introduction to the report, the the Court of Appeal’s vice president Lord Justice Holroyde, talked of the ‘immense pressure’ on professionals working in the courts and said that the Court of Appeal was ‘not immune’. ‘The increase in the proportion of cases involving litigants in person makes particular demands on the staff, as experience shows that such cases are more time-consuming than equivalent cases in which the applicant is represented.’ Elsewhere in the report, the court’s registrar Master Beldam put a more positive spin and suggested the increase in litigants in person reflected ‘the efforts made to remove the barriers to justice they face’.

The report noted it was ‘important that the litigants in person are not seen as a burden on the court and that they can access justice and effectively participate in the appeal process’ and listed a number of appeal cases by unrepresented litigants which were successfully quashed last year. That said, unrepresented litigants ‘use more judicial and administrative resources’ and ‘often engage in voluminous written and/or telephone correspondence’. It also complained of ‘repetitive and un-particularised grounds of appeal, sometimes running into hundreds of pages’.

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