MoJ spending – or rather the lack of it on Legal Aid – has been the political, and legal, battle of the year. There have been a range of counter arguments to cuts, the main one being it is a false economy as it just increases costs elsewhere,
In addittion a central negotiation tactic has been to offer joint working to drive out obvious waste in the system to make equivalent savings. There have been a number of contentious examples, increased, panic spend on the PDS, the ineffective procurement exercise of a single interpreter contract, and many more.
Yesterday we saw another the writing off £45.8m on abandoned building projects for new courts. This is obviously historic and, one trusts, the most appropriate solution, it is however still a very large amount of money down the plug hole.
I did wonder however how appropriate this phrase in mitigation from the MoJ was:
“the financial context was very different”
The MoJ are to launce a “lessons learned exercise” – which might be a bit like the “self verification” exercises forced upon our clients. If I may make an early suggestion to their review, how about this:
Take an equally aggressive an attitude to your internal spending as you do to that of our client’s Legal Aid claims
