Imagine you live in a terrace of houses*, have great relations with your neighbours and have created, over the years something of a community. Then, out of the blue, you are each, individually, served with eviction notices. There is big money to be made from “redevelopment”.
You approach you local, liked and trusted solicitor who, by chance is one of the very few with housing expertise and a Legal Aid housing contract. Most of your neighbours do not qualify for public funding however you, and a few others, do and are granted a certificate. Of the others some can, just, afford to pay privately. The ineligible remainder, faced with a 6 figure cost budget settle and agree to leave their homes on a guarantee they will not face any legal costs.
Post LASPO very little civil litigation is within scope, the threat of homelessness one of the few remaining areas. These are such cases.
Days after the grant of legal aid, however, the LAA have changed their mind and propose to discharge the certificate because:
“The majority of whom you are acting for are on a private client basis – your client therefore has alternative funding”
I will spare you a critique of why this is a misapplication of Civil Merits regs 39 (a).
Lets be clear, this is no class action but rather involves individual defences of individual possession proceedings, which require case-by-case litigation. Failure of these defences will result in homelessness and destitution.
The implication is clear however because you are defending possession proceedings, alongside your next-door neighbor, against the same applicant, your neighbours, not the legal aid fund, should fund your defence.
The LAA seems the only organisation fully to have embraced David Cameron’s long forgotten “big society”. Or is crowd-funded legal aid the next bit of “blue sky thinking”?
