Legal aid bill for asylum seekers rises

Scotland's bill for legal aid provided to asylum seekers has rocketed in the last 2 years. Figures release to the Scottish Conservatives show that the total bill was £3.8 million in 2008/09, and has already reached £2.5 million in 2010/11.

Assuming that this covers 6 months, then the total cost is heading for over £5 million by next April. Even if it covers 7 months, the total could reach nearly £4.5 million.

Shadow Cabinet Secretary for Justice, John Lamont says:

"There are hundreds of thousands of asylum cases that have been hanging around for years.

"This involves a huge cost to the taxpayer, as well as being unfair to those involved.

"A quick, efficient system would be a real benefit, but the last Labour government failed to deliver this despite 12 years of trying.

"The UK Government is considering what the public purse should be funding and how to make the legal aid system more efficient. These are astonishing sums of money and every penny spent from the justice budget on legal aid is money not available for policing the streets and preventing crime.

"The UK Government is having a fundamental look at the legal aid system, to innovate and provide a value for money scheme built on sound foundations. The SNP Scottish Government needs to do the same."

John's written question and the answer is below;

John Lamont (Roxburgh and Berwickshire) (Con): To ask the Scottish Executive how much legal aid was paid to lawyers to represent asylum seekers in each of the last 10 years.
(S3W-36979)

Mr Kenny MacAskill :

We can only give specific figures for asylum, to any degree of accuracy, after
April 2008.

The Scottish Legal Aid Board (SLAB) has responsibility for administering the legal aid scheme. It has recorded payment figures in the immigration & asylum category going back to 2001. However, a specific category within the advice & assistance scheme to separately identify cases of asylum seekers was only introduced just over 2 years ago - in April 2008.

In the separate scheme for civil legal aid, which pays for representation in relation to judicial hearings, the most specific subject matter SLAB has is to identify judicial or statutory reviews relating to immigration or asylum proceedings. There is no further breakdown and therefore we need to estimate specific asylum costs. The figures shown on the following table use these estimates as described and have combined the costs of advice and assistance and civil legal aid. The breakdown of the total paid is shown in terms of solicitor's fees, counsel's fees and outlays to cover expenses and items such as expert witness reports. Figures are rounded to the nearest thousand pounds.

There is some income received to cover costs in asylum and immigration. In 2009-10 4% of the gross costs in this area were recovered.

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