A Southland lawyer is worried thousands of vulnerable people are struggling to find a legal aid lawyer to represent them.
The president of the Criminal Bar Association and Invercargill lawyer Fiona Guy Kidd fears the situation could get even worse in the near future.
A survey from the New Zealand Law Society released this week showed 75% of legal aid lawyers have had to turn away people seeking legal assistance in the past year.
It also showed 35% of lawyers in Otago and Southland intended to do less or no legal aid work over the next 12 months.
Mrs Guy Kidd believed the survey highlighted the huge strain in which legal aid lawyers had found themselves in the past years.
The majority felt motivated to provide people with access to justice and feel a moral duty to do so, however, legal aid provision in its current state was not sustainable, she said.
Poor legal aid remuneration,the excessive legal aid administrative workload, and the stress involved with this type of work were among the reasons for this dissatisfaction.
‘‘What came through from this survey was that actually enough is enough,’’ Mrs Guy Kidd said.
‘‘Legal aid lawyers are deciding they can’t keep doing it at those rates.
‘‘They are going to leave or they are gonna stop doing.’’
During her 29-year career, she always managed her time to conciliate her legal aid work with her other clients.
However, the hourly rates for legal aid professionals was last adjusted back in 2009, she said.
The survey also showed 81% lawyers had provided some form of legal assistance for free in the past 12 months and nearly half of them had provided free legal assistance to individuals who could not afford to access the legal system.
‘‘It has been 13 years and inflation has increased significantly since then. The cost to run a law practice also increased, so it [the rates] is just completely out of sync of other professions and it is becoming unaffordable.’’
Another concern was that legal aid lawyers were ageing and not being replaced in equal numbers.
In Otago there was one PAL 4 (the category for the most serious crimes, where life or preventive detention may be imposed) listed lawyer under the age of 60.
While in Southland there was only one PAL 3 (who deals with offences where the penalty was more than 10 years) listed lawyer under 60, she said.
While the police were doing more to divert people out of the system in the lower end, the serious end of crime did not decrease and something needed to be done to attract more professionals to the area, she said.
Many people were having to self-represent themselves in hearings due to the lack of legal aid lawyers, which could cause a miscarriage of justice and also could put even more pressure in the justice system.
Mrs Guy Kidd and other lawyers across the country were calling on the Ministry of Justice to acknowledge the survey and make a change.
She hoped the ministry could secure more funding next year so rates could be adjusted according to the inflation.
This would also enable lawyers to be paid for the administrative work they did — which she said was not now being financially compensated — and also provide funding for senior lawyers to take junior professionals to be with them on trials and important hearings.
‘‘Currently there is no support in the system to train young lawyers and they are part of the future.
‘‘We need to ensure there is a succession of lawyers because my fear is no-one will want to do criminal legal aid and people most vulnerable will be the ones suffering the most.’’
