The government continues with its relentless reduction of the legal aid available for immigration and asylum work. Its latest cuts essentially make it financially unsustainable for barristers to accept instructions for asylum appeal cases and will also lead to an increase in work/decrease in profit costs for solicitors, whose profit margins have already been slashed to the bone on legal aid work. The new fixed fees come into force on 8 June and we can expect both solicitors and barristers to start being unable to afford to take on legally aided asylum appeals. This will lead both to solicitors and barristers losing important work but also to highly vulnerable individuals being forced to represent themselves in an unfamiliar and complex legal system.
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