Lawyers once again took to the streets across the country on Monday as the legal aid fees strike entered its second week. Speaking outside the Royal Courts of Justice in central London, Jo Sidhu QC, president of the Criminal Bar Association (CBA), said they would continue “until we get the justice we deserve and the public is entitled to”. Some colleagues standing next to him held up stickers of Barack Obama’s famous “Hope” poster, instead of Raab, with the word “Hope” or “No” and Sidhu explaining that they were angry at the attorney general’s failure to speak to them. “It is deeply regrettable that the Minister for Justice has so far refused to speak to the Criminal Bar Association from October 2021 in order to urgently find a solution to the current crisis, with a fair settlement for the Criminal Bar Association without which there will be no is anyone to defend or prosecute a pending record,” Sidhu said. A CBA source told the Guardian that a conservative estimate would suggest that by the end of Monday, the third day of the strike, up to 2,000 cases had been affected. A Ministry of Justice (MoJ) source said 700 cases were adjourned last week, but only included cases adjourned on the day they were due to be heard, not those adjourned in advance because of the walkout. Online listings showed several courts at the Old Bailey in London with no cases listed on Monday. The action will compound the already long backlog, which the CBA says has been caused by underfunding and means people wait about 700 days from offense to completion, on average. Raab’s latest direct engagement with the CBA comes ahead of the publication of the Criminal Legal Aid Review (Clar), which, having been first announced three years before its final publication in December, recommended an immediate 15% minimum rise in legal fees subscription. On Thursday, the Ministry of Justice announced that the 15% pay rise would be implemented from the end of September, claiming that the typical criminal lawyer would receive an extra £7,000 a year as a result. But CBA is asking for 25% and is angry at the delay. It also says many will receive nothing more than £7,000, with specialist criminal lawyers earning an average annual income of £12,200 after spending in the first three years of practice. Subscribe to First Edition, our free daily newsletter – every morning at 7am. BST Kirsty Brimelow QC, vice-president of the CBA, told Sky News: “The government is not actually offering 15%. What he is offering is 15% which will trickle down to lawyers in about a year or two because the increase would only apply to new cases. “Obviously, right now we have a backlog of about 58,000 cases, and so the concern of the criminal bar association and one of the reasons why criminal lawyers are taking this action is because it’s just unlikely that there will be enough lawyers left in two years.” . year.” Criminal lawyers are on strike until Wednesday this week, with the strike increasing by one day each week until it reaches five days in the week starting July 18. If there is still no solution, from August they will strike five days every other week. The Department of Justice has been approached for comment.
