pumpkinstrokemarrow

Spent part of the afternoon pondering about legal aid, the bill for which is said to be huge and which is also said to be funding all kinds of bad causes. Ridiculous appeals from various kinds of bad people. Habitual and violent criminals whose barrister manages to find some flaw in the entirely sensible conviction. Unpleasant seekers of political asylum who manage to spin the process out so long that they acquire an English wife at which point it becomes their human right to stay, irrespective of how unpleasant they might be. Whatever bad habits they may have brought with them from their dump of a country.

So start to surf around a bit. Fairly quickly find out that legal aid is around £2b, roughly half criminal and half civil. Most of the civil is family - presumably divorce and such like - but there is a chunk for immigration matters. Also fairly quickly find out that the whole point is to make justice accessible to all. Subject to constraints of fairness, common sense and affordability. Which seems eminently reasonable. Then try to drill down a layer and get lost in a morass of stuff from the Ministry of Justice and the Legal Services Commission, this last being the gang that runs legal aid in England and Wales. Some at least of which appears to have been posted on the Internet in a form which shows the last revision. All that crossing out in red stuff which you can get Word to do if you are clever. Very un-clever; careless even. But there does appear to be a lot of good work going on to drive the costs of legal aid down. To come to some more sensible accommodation with the legal trades, every bit a match for the boiler making trades of yesteryear.

But I fail to get a more detailed, lay-legible analysis of where the legal aid money goes. So try a different tack. Do I care? Take a peek at HMG's financial statistics - the blue book I think - and after some head and other scratching, decide that the country is worth maybe £1.4 thousand billion a year. Take a peek at the HMT website to find the thing illustrated in the previous posting. Which tells me without any scratching at all that the government annual spend is around half the available total, say £0.7 thousand billion. From which I work out that legal aid, that prop to civilisation as we know it (not to mention all those fat mortgages which our fat lawyers have secured on it), accounts for perhaps a seventh of a percent of the big cake, a third of a percent of the government cake. Which does not sound like much at all.

HMT used to have a story that the successive spending rounds which they conduct are a good way of getting money allocated to the right things. That pressures at the margin, expressed by fighting among the spending departments and their ministers, work towards an equilibrium, rather like prices do the same sort of thing in first year undergraduate economics. Those nice graphs which always have a sensible and stable equilibrium point. I think I believe this story. That in the round, the money is allocated to the right things. So £2 billion is probably what we should be spending to make justice accessible to all. Nevertheless, the £2 billion is going to have to take its share of the hit, along with everything else.