 Felly byddwn i'n dwybod i gynhyrchu wrth yng Nghymru, leeniol yn y Llywodraeth, y fawr a byddoedd cyfnodol i dwybod ar y dweud o yng Nghymru. Ac yn y ddweud o'r parwyr iawn, mae'n dweud yn rhoi'r ysgol o'r unedig yr Unedig, yng Nghymru, yw'n dweud o'r ystoddau. A'r ysgrifetio nôl o'r hyn o dweud o'r Fyfrith, gallwch chi'n gwybod i'r ysgol efo'r Lleid Ynodol? Well, thanks Simon. It's great to be here and I think the question is an important one, especially given the cuts we've had to legal aid. Many people in the legal profession and in wider civil society are concerned about whether we can afford or have access to justice without a properly funded legal aid system. I think viewers would be interested to know that an important piece of legislation came out in 2012, known as LASPO, which did have an impact on the amount of money the state would give to lawyers and legal advice agencies to support the provision of free legal advice and representation. So it's important to be clear that legal aid still very much exists, very much present in the criminal law and in certain civil law issues, but the number of range of cases and the types of people who can qualify for legal aid has been restricted and the overall budget has been cut. You might take a political view about whether that's a good thing or not. Let's take that view then. Couldn't you say lawyers are paid a fortune? Why should taxpayers subsidise lawyers to argue cases against the government and also funded by the taxpayers? That's a good point. Some research done last year looking at the hourly rates of solicitors partners in big city law firms in London and these fees are eye-watering. You're getting average rates of £1,000 per hour in some big city law firms. Now, to put that in context, that is people engage often in commercial corporate law work for large corporations working on huge cases worth millions and millions of pounds. But these are areas where legal aid has never gone. There are lawyers making a lot of money and in the past some lawyers made a good deal of money out of legal aid. But I think it's fair to say that those days are gone in relation to legal aid. When you talk to people who have legal aid practices, say for example at the criminal bar, especially at the junior bar, people are struggling to make a go of it in terms of making a living. Where there's a problem I think in terms of us thinking about a just society is whether people can get the advice and the representation that they need. Take for example the events surrounding the Grenfell fire. What you have there is a situation where people who are in need of perhaps legal advice around their tenancies, getting rehousing and stuff, there is a limit now to the number of lawyers who can afford to provide free legal advice. And some people are concerned about legal advice deserts. So yes there are some lawyers in the commercial sector who are still making an awful lot of money, but what the concern is is are the people in the areas working in social security law and housing law, are there enough people being able to offer free advice there? It was a very good example, but didn't the law society intervene and say actually there is a neighbourhood law centre in North Kensington that has been doing good work and we don't want firms coming in to exploit this? No, that's right. Well I think what we're talking about is whether there's provision for people who are in need and who can't afford to instruct a lawyer to get the advice that they need. And I think one of the key pillars of our democratic society is the rule of law. So that means that those in power have to abide by legal rules. And that's such a fundamental provision that it's almost difficult to appreciate unless you actually think about what life would be like if people could arbitrarily decide to take your house from you or to move you on from the house that you're living in or something like that. Now access to just rule of law therefore depends upon people being able to access the courts who are the arbiters of the rule of law. So let's suppose that I object to Brexit and I want to challenge what the government is doing about it. Should I get legal aid for that or can't I just ask the barristers to do it for free? Or is there another opportunity of doing it? Well that's a really good point because there are some barristers and there is a tradition within the legal profession to work pro bono, to work for the public good. So some cases are taken on a pro bono basis and one of our colleagues here at the AP University has taken pro bono cases from jurisdictions in Jamaica, people involved in criminal cases there. So that's a good example. But going back to Brexit, the Gina Miller case, you remember Gina Miller was one of the applicants in the review of the power of the government to withdraw to sign the article 50 declaration without first going to Parliament. That was a big case around Christmas time. You remember the Daily Mail did the famous enemies of the people headline and what we had there is a situation where the case was funded by essentially crowdfunding. So people put money in using social media to support the legal action to get that matter heard before the courts and this is something that's increasingly the case that certain issues of kind of general public importance can be funded by campaigners through crowdfunding. So we've seen as well as a response to the coalition between the Tory party and the DUP. The deal with the DUP, yeah. There's a crowdfunding case going on at the moment regarding whether that amounts to a breach of the bribery act or even a breach of the Good Friday Agreement. But the cynics would say, at the end of the case, suppose the applicants lose, what's happened is the barristers have been paid by other people. Now it might in this case be the public. But if it was legal aid it would be the taxpayer. Why don't the barristers just do it for free? Well, some barristers do work for free in the sense that there is this tradition of pro bono, but I think it's perhaps unrealistic to think that all lawyers would work for free all the time. And there is a wider question of how the level of which people are paid. Yeah, well that's a good point because BBC presenters are in the news and some of the men are saying, well we'd be delighted if the women got paid as much. And then some of the critical public are saying, well why don't you get less pay and give that to those who are doing the same job as you? So with the lawyers, could we agree on if you like the price of a just society, not a thousand pounds an hour but I don't know, 50 pounds an hour, 100 pounds an hour or whatever, would that be fair? Well, the legal aid system does to an extent give fixed prices for certain types of legal representation and legal work in a number of days in a trial, sometimes preparing and so on. But effectively, we live in a market society and I suppose going back to the BBC presenters or the footballers and so on, if you've got a particular talent in a particular area then you can command a higher price. So a particularly talented barrister who's a very good advocate might be able to charge a higher price from a client who can afford to pay. So this raises bigger questions about inequalities in pay that point to a wider discussion which I'm sure you've been having during this series about what amounts to a just society in terms of the distribution of resources and the levels of taxation. In terms of citizenship, central part of our strategic research area, let's take the example of asylum seekers and it's not some rich commercial barrister who's helping them. It's a young solicitor somewhere around the UK and she's interviewing the asylum seeker and then probably really getting caught up in the case and championing this and so on. Now that person isn't being paid a fortune for legal aid, are they? And we do want or you and I I guess want those asylum seekers to be represented. Yeah, if we care about the rule of law, which means that if there is an issue, a legal issue, it should be resolved fairly and impartially and if it does need to go to court, part of that needs that the people involved in the case need to be properly understand their legal rights and their legal position. And given how complex the law can be, it's unrealistic to expect for example an asylum seeker to be able to navigate their own way through the court system. Of course, to make it clear, there is no bar to representing yourself at court. You are able to speak to the judge if you're a litigant in the case so you can represent yourself. But the problem with that is that there's not that many people who have the background knowledge when you're in a high stake setting such as in the asylum case, you'd want to make sure you were putting the case in the right way, that you've not forgotten key points of law. And so in this situation you were talking about, the legal aid solicitor, that we do need to make sure that there's a baseline level of access to the courts. Access to the courts doesn't just mean being able to get there but to have the advice to be able to make your case properly. You sound like a social crusader for a justice entity and that's why you're both an academic lawyer and at the Open University? Or is that too pious or we're looking at it? Well, I think there are a number of reasons why I've chosen to work here but I think the social justice mission of the Open University is something that I'm proud of and I still think it's something that informs what people do at the university. And we were conceived as an institution to provide increased opportunity for people who would not otherwise be able to access higher education. And what we've done in the law school is to try and integrate that into the way we teach law and with a new project that's fully launching in the autumn called Open Justice which will allow students to engage in some of these issues about access to justice and to really think about how we as a law school can serve the public good by reaching out to people who might need support or benefit from having a better understanding of legal principles. That sounds great. We look forward to that. I guess it'll be the rerun, the next series of these chats. That'll be really good. Just a last way of looking at it. You mentioned Grenfell and I think it is important for students on these Facebook live chats to take whatever is in the news and to think about it. Is it the case that if one of those tenants complained to over the last five years, if somebody had had a lawyer who was funded by the public purse and had really pursued it, we might have stopped that kind of disaster, is that the best way of looking at it? Well, it's conceivable. I suppose it's too early to, we still don't know fully the cause of what happened. But in principle, yes, if you've got people in Grenfell Tower who were fairly vulnerable really in terms of their ability to instruct proper legal advice, they did have issues, concerns about the safety of the building in advance of the fire. And it seems from what I've read that not all of those concerns were listened to. And I think if you put on top of that the difficulty in getting good legal advice, especially in areas to do with legal aid practice such as social housing, which isn't an area where you're going to go and huge amounts of money, then I think these two things together do raise some uncomfortable questions. Hugh MacFall, thank you very much. Thank you to everybody who's been following our series of discussions about how we can make a just society. Thanks.