Law for the poor: The relationship between advice agencies and solicitors in the development of poverty law

Abstract

Legal aid, governments tell us, is too expensive. As the 1994/5 the budget for England and Wales climbed to over £1.3 billion, lawyers were blamed for stimulating unnecessary demand. The argument that legal aid is a mere 'demand creation' exercise by the legal profession was once confined to radical academics (Bankowski and Mungham, 1976; Abel, 1982). It is now, however, widely accepted within government. When a right-wing think tank, the Social Market Foundation, claimed that increases in the legal aid budget reflected 'supplier-induced demand' (Bevan et al., 1994), the Lord Chancellor replied that he found such an analysis 'compelling' (Mackay, 1995, p. 12). The present structure of the civil legal aid scheme in England and Wales reflects its historical origins, which have, in turn, been shaped by eighty years of debate between the profession, its critics and government. The profession has played a major, and often dominant, role in such debates—and has, naturally, attempted to shape the scheme its own interests. But it is overly simplistic to imagine that the profession has had it all its own way, or that its sole motivation has been to create demand. Much of the responsibility for stimulating demand for legal aid lies with the advice movement, a sector which is all too often overlooked in the history of legal assistance. This article draws on a mass of previously unexplored archive material to retell the story of how civil legal has developed since the First World War. It concentrates on 'poverty law', where legal aid has not only provided a different payment regime for lawyers but has changed the definitions of what lawyers should be doing. It considers the contests over how far lawyers should help the poor in their disputes with landlords, employers, creditors, and state bureaucrats. It argues that the organised profession has never taken the initiative in developing new markets among the poor. Instead, others—social workers, voluntary groups and pressure groups— have lead the way in pointing out problems and offering solutions. As Paterson and