Colin Lancaster is the chief executive of the Scottish Legal Aid Board. Here, he argues legal aid legal aid helps more people. However he acknowledges change is needed in an appeal to the Scottish Government.

The most important aspect of legal aid is the people it helps. There were more than 176,000 grants of legal assistance last year with payments made from public funding of £151 million. It is on track to be over £170 million this year – its highest ever level.

That’s a lot of people in Scotland getting much-needed help with often life-changing problems. It is also a financial boost for hundreds of committed lawyers after over a decade of declining expenditure driven mainly by falling prosecution numbers, followed by the pandemic’s major disruption to court cases.

The help that legal aid pays for covers a wide spectrum of legal issues: from family matters, arranging guardianships for loved ones, or housing, to human rights and mental health. Representation at children’s hearings is covered too. It also pays for legal representation for those accused of crimes, ensuring a fair trial remains an essential and fundamental right in Scotland.

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Legal aid helps real people, with real problems, to pursue and defend their basic rights. Sometimes legal aid funds high-profile cases, such as the Post Office Horizon cases, major Fatal Accident Inquiries and the current challenge to the UK and Scottish Government’s changes to winter fuel payments, which could not have gone ahead without legal aid support. But little publicity is given to most of the problems that people need help with. These are some of the most vulnerable people in society, facing a complex range of problems and seeking help from advice agencies and solicitors funded by legal aid.

Despite the huge amount of help delivered, and significantly above inflation increases in fees paid to lawyers, total expenditure and average payments, concerns are being raised that the legal aid system is in crisis. There is no doubt that some of those seeking and providing help face challenges. Many of these cannot be resolved by the legal aid system. Some relate to structures of the legal profession, changes in career expectations, and the support available to small businesses, for example to help them embrace technology or adapt to changing patterns of need and the modernisation of the justice system.

But it is equally clear that the legal aid system does have to change. We continue to make that call to the Scottish Government. It delivers vital public funding for crucial services, but it is fundamentally still the system designed in the post-war era of the 1950s. We don’t believe that in its current form it can deliver what the public rightly expects of a modern, accessible public service.

The current system is complex and hard to navigate. It isn’t person centred. There is no mechanism for connecting those in need with solicitors or advice agencies that can help them, and no guarantee that services with sufficient resources will be available to provide help.

Equally, the current system has limited scope for targeting resources at priority issues or securing services in any given place or for a particular type of problem. Add these weaknesses to the challenge of ensuring that delivering legal aid funded services remains a sustainable economic prospect for providers, and change is undoubtedly needed.

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Scotland needs a system that can adapt depending on the issues people are facing now and in the future. It has to provide services designed with peoples’ needs at the forefront and clearly focused on delivering stated outcomes. Being clearer about what the public can expect also helps hold the system to account should it fall short of those expectations.

Short term changes are needed to simplify the current system for everyone involved. We’ve been developing proposals, discussing those with the legal profession and third sector providers and making recommendations to the Scottish Government. We hope that this will lead to early change.

At the same time, we are keen to continue this collaborative approach to explore ways of linking the way legal assistance is planned, delivered and funded with user needs and changes in the wider justice system. These kinds of change can’t be delivered overnight, but collaboration is key to developing recommendations for the primary legislation needed to deliver a system redesigned to meet the needs of the people of Scotland in the 21st century.