Three months will be tight for all of us—and no messing—but a number of safeguards will ensure that people are able to get legal aid cover in place.
For a start, something like 80 per cent of the applications that we get for judicial review, and about 60 per cent of those that we grant, relate to asylum or immigration. They tend to be part of a continuing process; they have been elsewhere in the system, and judicial review is just the final stage. As a result, this move is not a surprise to anyone who is involved in such cases.
Every year, a huge number of solicitors use what is called special urgency for a whole range of cases. Last year, there were about 11,000 such cases; in 8,500 of them, the solicitor would have been able to protect the client’s position, including by putting in submissions in cases where there was a time bar, without having to come near us. That sort of thing happens in cases that are subject to a maximum period of three or five years, and I am amazed at the number of cases that come in at the very last stage, even though the person in question has had three or five years. In such cases, the solicitor can use special urgency to get the petition into court.
However, if a three-month time limit is introduced, we will be able to take a decision on an application—and, as long as it meets the statutory tests, grant the legal aid—if we get the application early and the solicitor gives us all the information that we require. I believe that someone said in evidence that we would wait until the petition stage, but I do not think so. If the application meets the statutory tests, we will grant the legal aid. If a solicitor comes late in the three-month period or if we do not get enough information and have to go back to them, they will be able to take special urgency measures to get the petition into court and protect the client’s interests. It will, of course, mean that we will have to prioritise judicial review applications to ensure that we experience no delays.
Secondly, we will want to do quite a lot of work with the profession to ensure that there is much fuller guidance on what we need for a judicial review application to be successful. At the moment, we have to return or continue an awful lot of those applications, only to grant them on review. We would like to get all the necessary information to grant them the first time round, because that would benefit everyone involved, including the lawyers, the clients and the courts. We think that, if that were done, the process would be much more manageable. We will all have to be disciplined, which will be a challenge, but if the proposal in question goes ahead we do not think that it will cause problems with access to justice.