In recent times, modern governments in England and Wales and Australia have sought to curtail a legal aid budget, which they believe to be spiralling out of control.Footnote ¹ This has led to large-scale cuts in publicly funded legal assistance – with the aim of making significant financial savings. This excellent book is principally concerned with whether these savings objectives have been met and at what price. Editors Flynn and Hodgson have brought together an impressive and varied range of contributing authors made up of academics, practitioners and advocates (across both jurisdictions) to provide a comparative analysis of these issues based on their own experiences and new empirical and theoretical work.

In providing these unique perspectives on various aspects of changes to access to justice and legal aid, Flynn and Hodgson argue in chapter 1 that assuming cutting funds will equate with savings is a ‘false assumption’Footnote ² and that instead we need a ‘new narrative’ against a ‘dominant view’. That allegedly false dominant view is that publicly funded legal advice and representation is unnecessary and that cuts are essential.Footnote ³ The chapters from the contributing authors that follow illuminate particular adverse consequences flowing from policy and funding changes in England and Wales and Australia. Together, these seek to show the economic, legal and personal price with which cuts in this area are bought, and construct an argument that savings objectives are not met.

While in many ways a depressing story, the authors also provide numerous recommendations for improvements, some large scale and some smaller scale, but all broadly sensible and of use to policy makers and practitioners in these areas. For example, for Noone (chapter 2), part of the reason for increased legal aid demand in Australia can be found in government policies, such as increases in the numbers of police and child protection officers. This leads her to suggest compulsory legal aid impact statements in government announcements to allow the ‘downstream’ consequences of superficially unrelated policy changes on the legal aid system (and hence, their actual costs) to be more easily recognised.Footnote ⁴ Another example (dealing with a separate issue), this time at the practitioner level, is coping with the removal of federal funding for systemic advocacy work traditionally carried out by community law centres. After outlining the problem and its adverse consequences, Buchanan (chapter 8) points to the example of the Victorian Environment Defenders Office's response as a way for centres to try to cope with the problems: they rebranded as an activist organisation and are now ‘thriving on philanthropic and crowd funding’.Footnote ⁵ This mixture of well-informed critique and recommendations (or practical coping mechanisms) will enlarge the audience to which the book may be beneficial.

The book's greatest strength is the variety of topics discussed, with the impact of litigants in person in the criminal courts (chapter 5), community legal and third sectors (chapters 8, 9 and 10) and legal aid's position in human rights discourse (chapter 11) being just a few examples of the many areas covered. Each chapter provides either a broad view of legal aid issues or zooms in to consider a particular issue in detail (sometimes based on a particular empirical research project or practical experiences).

The discussion of broad issues opens up scope for consideration of some further matters. For example, Smith and Cape's analysis (chapter 4) of the sorry tale of criminal legal aid in England and Wales usefully shows how the government narrative of ‘supplier induced demand’ and ‘out of control spending’ on criminal legal aid is a false one,Footnote ⁶ but this leaves open the question of why this narrative took hold. The chapter explains that the government wanted to make savings and had a hostility to welfare spending, but the question remains as to why criminal lawyers are such a good target for savings in a way that the medical profession, for example, is not. Why does the general public apparently so easily swallow the ‘fat cat lawyers’Footnote ⁷ narrative in this area?

Likewise, Byrom in chapter 12 laments a lack of parity of esteem between civil and criminal legal aid (apparently criminal legal aid has the greater esteem).Footnote ⁸ However, in theory, we might expect more esteem for civil legal aid because the capacity for association with ‘guilty people’ is significantly reduced. Given what we have read in chapters 4 and 5, this is an interesting claim, which could benefit from being probed further.

A similar comment can be made about the more focused chapters. Spencer's discussion (chapter 5) of litigants in person in the criminal courts offers one solution as more ‘unbundling’ of legal services in criminal law, giving the example of road traffic offences.Footnote ⁹ Originally, unbundling was developed as a concept in the USA for civil law cases.Footnote ¹⁰ It involves clients paying lawyers to provide some services on their case, but with the client taking overall ownership of the rest of it. This suggestion may have merit, but the risks in criminal law require further consideration. Laster and Kornhauser's critical comments in chapter seven on ‘DIY law’ in generalFootnote ¹¹ would suggest that caution is required before bringing it into criminal law. On the other hand, due to the requirements to fulfil means and merits tests before legal aid (and thus full representation beyond advice from the duty solicitor) is granted in magistrates’ courts,Footnote ¹² this approach has already been happening in England and Wales for many years – without being labelled as ‘unbundling’. Consideration of the effectiveness of that is open for further inquiry.

Together, the collection of views and experiences provides the reader with a wide view of the relevant issues. Cross-jurisdictional comparisons can also be made in many areas, for example, from the chapters discussing Australian community law centres and those of the British third sector. With the financial challenges faced by both sectors being similar, comparisons of their respective coping strategies can provide extra depth to future analysis of these issues. This, as the editors themselves point out, is a deliberate attempt to move away from earlier approaches focusing on just one area of law in depth, or just one jurisdiction (or a collection of geographically close ones) in depth.Footnote ¹³ In that sense, the book breaks new ground for providing this opportunity for comparative perspective between current access to justice and legal aid issues in England and Wales and Australia. It may not be the first book to have examined access to justice and legal aid comparatively,Footnote ¹⁴ but it provides a uniquely broad, detailed and up-to-date examination of the issues across these two jurisdictions in particular.

The potential for comparison is stronger in some areas than others. For example, the discussion of criminal legal aid cuts in England and Wales certainly provides a very useful ‘big picture’ analysis of its future in those countries, but there is no equivalent discussion of the Australian experience of criminal legal aid in particular (though there is some discussion of the issue in general in other chapters). We do, however, see the very particular example of the practical effects of litigants in person in the Australian criminal courts. The result is that the chapters dealing with criminal justice, while very valuable in themselves, do not mesh quite so well as others in the work. The addition of an equivalent Australian ‘big picture’ criminal legal aid landscape discussion and a discussion of British litigants in person in criminal courts, could have allowed similar and fruitful cross-jurisdictional comparisons to be made.Footnote ¹⁵ This does not detract from their usefulness in isolation though – it is more a case of a missed opportunity, than anything wrong with what is present in the book. Every chapter still stands very well on its own, such that – and this is another overall strength of the work – relevant individual chapters could also quite fruitfully be read in isolation by the reader with a particular interest.

Overall, this is an excellent and informative book. It will be of great use both to the novice wanting an introduction to contemporary issues in access to justice and legal aid and to the specialist wishing to deepen their own knowledge and stimulate further discussion and debate. Perhaps most of all, it ought to be considered required reading for policy-makers in this area. The most persuasive and consistent lesson we learn from the various case studies in this book is that policy choices in this area can have far-reaching, unexpected, and often expensive, consequences for the legal system and the taxpayer – alongside devastating personal consequences for the most vulnerable people in society. This book can provide the broader awareness of these issues that is required in order to avoid making similar mistakes in future.