 Welcome to the 7th meeting of 2020-23 in session 6 of the Equalities, Human Rights and Civil Justice Committee. We have no apologies this morning. First agenda item is to agree to take item 3, which is consideration of today's evidence in private. I re-agreed. That is agreed. Second item on our agenda is to hear from stakeholders regarding access to justice in Scotland. We hear from Jim Stevenson, convener access to justice committee at the Law Society of Scotland, Jen Ang, director of just right Scotland, Fiona McPhail, principal solicitor at Shelter Scotland, Rachel Moon, senior solicitor and legal service manager at the Government Hill Law Centre, Colin Lancaster, chief executive of the Scottish legal aid board and Gillian Fife, strategic lead of the strong community of citizens advice Scotland, who is joining us remotely. You are all very welcome. We have chosen a round table format today in order to encourage a little bit more of an informal discussion around the issues, so please feel free to indicate and come in on any of the issues that are of interest to you. The committee is keen to hear about how you are currently supporting people seeking advice, the challenges your services are facing and access to funding. The committee is also interested in hearing your views on legal aid reform. First, I will ask each of you to introduce yourself, say a little bit about the work that your organisation does and maybe a little bit about whether there has been a change to that work as a result of the pandemic and the cost of living crisis. I am just going to go in clockwork fashion starting with Jim Stevenson, please. Good morning, convener and committee. Thank you very much for allowing the Law Society to participate in this. The major issue facing civil legal aid practitioners is that they support the most vulnerable in society, including people suffering from mental illness or victims of domestic abuse. Increasingly, fewer lawyers are offering to do legal aid. Those who continue are swamped, so it is common for them to stop taking on new cases because of the heavy workload. Women's aid organisations have told me that they are unable to find civil legal aid lawyers and have sought funding from charitable organisations to pay for lawyers outside the legal aid system. Additionally, the number of legal aid lawyers in the Highlands and Borders who are willing to take part in their children's duty plan is extremely low. For example, in Inverness and Elgin, there are 15 firms listed on the duty plan, but only one of them is local. There is also a problem with adult settlement within capacity cases. This is a rising demand for this, and yet there are not for legal aid lawyers available to meet that need. Last year, the Scottish Government's scheme to part fund 40 trainees in the legal aid sector has been welcomed by the Law Society in the profession. However, newly qualified solicitors are being offered a third more than legal aid firms can offer by people in private practice or other areas. Without urgent action, there will be further decline. The question is how do we retain lawyers in this sector? The setting up of an annual review of fees is essential for legal aid firms to be able to demonstrate to graduates that this area of law has a future. Thank you very much for this opportunity to give evidence today at committee on access to justice and specifically on how the current political, economic and regulatory environment has impacted access to services and service delivery by third sector organisations and legal charities like ours. Just Rights Scotland as a charity was founded by human rights lawyers to defend and extend people's rights in Scotland. We do that by providing free, confidential legal advice to people across Scotland in areas in which there are gaps in access to special advice. That includes women's rights and survivors of gender-based violence through the Scottish Women's Rights Centre. I think that there will be some echoing of what Jim Stevenson has just said here. Also survivors of trafficking and labour exploitation through our Anti-Trafficking and Exploitation Centre, unaccompanied asylum-seeking children and migrant women fleeing violence through our Refugee and Migrant Centre and people facing disability discrimination, race discrimination and discrimination on account of their sex or LGBT plus identity through the Scottish Just Law Centre. We also run the Ukraine Advice Scotland project, which provides free advice to Ukrainians and their families on seeking safe routes to Scotland. What I would like to emphasise is that we run those services on a combination of private charitable trust funding, some core Scottish Government funding and a tiny bit of legal aid funding. What I am pointing out is that there is a range of solutions that feed into meeting the access to justice gap and we need to have a full and frank conversation about what we and other organisations need to continue to do this work. In brief, as you would expect, we continue to see demand for our services outstrip our capacity to meet that demand. That is the reason why we work in partnership with other lawyers and advice organisations, including Citizens Advice Scotland here today, Shelter Scotland and the Government Law Centre. We all understand that the most efficient means of addressing this gap is to work together when there is such a scarcity of resource. We are also here to highlight that the burden of continuing to address this gap must not fall only on the third sector, on private charitable funding and on our colleagues to work harder, smarter and faster, but mostly harder. As you will be aware, we think that that has in part to do with the slow disintegration of the civil legal advice sector in areas of social justice law in particular. Those are areas such as public law, housing, welfare and community care and immigration and asylum. All areas where the market does not provide sufficient incentive for people already in practice to step in. We would also highlight that, in specialist legal areas such as domestic violence, sexual harassment, trafficking and labour exploitation, there is more that needs to be done in Scotland, which is to see that there might be lawyers willing to take up that work, but the infrastructure, the support and the funding to do that needs to be thought through. I am aware that this is a wee bit long, so I am just going to scooch forward and see what we would like to discuss today. How we can work together and how the Scottish Government can work on a more unified footing to look at its obligations under international law to provide for access to justice across the board and specifically to look at its vision for justice strategy and to meet those ambitions. We think that what is needed is a clear understanding of all the areas where duty arises on the Scottish Government to ensure access for justice, both in the civil and the criminal legal systems, and understanding of where there are gaps in barriers and access to advice now and what is causing those gaps, because there are short and long-term solutions, and understanding of those longer-term opportunities such as the human rights bill, but also threats such as the continuing erosion of the number of lawyers and advisers who are being recruited, trained and progressed in those roles. Finally, a focused and comprehensive strategy with resource over more than five years to reverse those trends. We would like to answer your question about widening gaps. We think that that is increasingly urgent in light of our experience and what my colleagues I am sure will share around the impact of the pandemic, our response as well as the cost of living crisis. I will not rehearse the evidence here, but I think that we all accept that those things have increased inequality in Scotland. In conclusion, we would submit that a country like Scotland, with the resource and the ambition to be a world leader, can do better. We welcome that opportunity to start a conversation about the levers or the mechanisms that we could employ to take that longer-term approach to addressing that problem. Good morning, convener. Good morning, committee. Thank you for the opportunity to be here today. I echo what both Jim Stevenson and Jen Ang have said today. I would also refer to the written evidence that Shelter Scotland has submitted to the committee. The starting point here has already been said that this is an exacerbation of pre-existing structural inequalities. Our human rights law or domestic law has long recognised that eviction is the most severe form of interference with the right to respect for the home enshrined in article 8 of the European Convention of Human Rights. Scotland can proudly boast some of the strongest legal protections for tenants across both the public and private sector as well as for homeless people. Yet the scandalous truth is that for years many tenants and homeless people have been denied access to justice. We can look at the fundamental reasons for that in terms of the structural inequalities, the lack of social housing and the inadequately funded statutory services, but in the context of the delivery of our services, I believe that the barriers to access to justice fall under three broad themes. There is a lack of awareness of rights and we see that commonly in the field of homelessness with clients who have presented as homeless to a local authority and taken at face value what they have been told. Sorry, we have no accommodation available today, come back tomorrow or you do not have a local connection, go back to ex-place and people will spend weeks in that situation before they are too desperate and have no other option but to get advice. The second reason is to do with the complexity of needs and the vulnerability of these clients. Not only might they be facing eviction or already homeless but many of our clients present highly distressed, mentally and physically disabled. We are noticing an increase in the number of disabled clients that are approaching our services. Many will be fleeing domestic violence and many, if not all, will be in financial insecurity. Any one of those factors presents a challenge, but to be navigating or dealing with all of those does seem to be quite unfathomable. The third and main barrier, arguably the one that I would be grateful to discuss further today, concerns the lack of specialist advice services. As colleagues have already said today, here we can have the strongest legal rights in place, we can know about those rights, but if we cannot get through the door and access the specialist advisor or the lawyer, those rights are questionable in terms of their practical and meaningfulness. When it comes to the delivery of those services, as has already been said, people in housing crisis are almost entirely reliant on the third sector, a third sector that is dealing with increasing demand, a third sector that has to look at an increasingly competitive funding pool, and it struggles to recruit, train and retain staff. We are in that housing emergency, and Shelters Scotland's call here is for an emergency response. Aside from building more social housing and adequately funding our services, let's look at the issue of access to justice. Tinkering around the edges is something that we have done and need to continue doing, but we are at the stage where we need radical and root and branch reform. The pandemic has taught many important lessons to us. I think that the legal profession has reacted very well. We are now delivering a combination of remote and in-person services. Many of us will offer digital advice, but we do have more fundamental issues here when the cues of people are growing and we are not able to offer access to justice, which is such a fundamental right. The Citizens Advice Network, comprised of Citizens Advice Scotland, has the extra help unit in our 59 member bureau to give a form Scotland's largest independent advice network. It is advice-provided virus services free, independent, confidential and partial and available to everyone. We look at the problems that people bring to our advice services and campaign and advocate for change that it is needed most. We work for a fairer Scotland where people are empowered and their rights are respected. During January 2023, Scottish Caps helped more than 22,000 people by providing over 93,000 pieces of advice. That represents a 10 per cent increase on client numbers compared to January 2022. In addition, our online advice pages saw the highest number of page views outside of the pandemic and the third highest number of page views ever. These figures demonstrate that the cost of living crisis is driving an increased demand for advice across the Citizens Advice Network. Advice-related access to justice forms an important part of the work of the Citizens Advice Network with more than 3,000 pieces of advice on legal proceedings being provided in an average month. During 2022, the most common access to justice issues on which advice was provided were simple procedure, benefits tribunals and capacity, legal aid and solicitors and advocates. While advice-provided on legal proceedings by CAB can be wide-ranging, we are aware of some common issues faced by clients, such as access in a practitioner who will take on a case funded by legal aid, issues with supply of legal practitioners in certain parts of the country in relation to particular areas of specialism and issues with the accessibility of virtual or remote proceedings, and I would hope to expand on some of those points during the session. The economic value that is provided by the Citizens Advice Bureau on legal proceedings is an estimated of £11.58 million, and that clearly demonstrates the effective early intervention and prevention role that the Citizens Advice Network plays in Scotland. Therefore, it is crucial that we believe that Citizens Advice Bureau and any specialist access to justice projects that they run, such as in-court advice, is funded on a consistent and long-term basis in order to help to improve outcomes for people. I thank you for inviting Govan Law Centre to be here today. We are grateful to be here. Govan Law Centre is a multidisciplinary service in which we provide housing debt, welfare rights and legal advice from advisor level to solicitor advocacy level. It is all in house, which means that we can work fast and efficiently. It means that we can identify strategic challenges and act on them quickly. However, after the rounds of funding that we have lost out on, we have lost staff and we are just too lean to be able to take the strategic litigation that we would wish to take on a daily basis or a weekly basis. As a result of the impact of Covid-19 with the cost-living crisis, Brexit and inflation running at 10 per cent, our cases are more complex and are more time-consuming. Being under-resourced means that we can't act in the way that we want to be acting. What we would call upon is the better funding and investment into specialist advice network, but also strategic work to allow us to progress and move the boundaries of equality's law. Good morning, committee. Thank you for the opportunity to be part of this morning's round table. The panel, as you have heard, encompasses public, private and third sectors, specialists, journalists, national, local, legal and other advisers. It is a good demonstration of the range of services and the ways of organising services that operate in this sphere. The knowledge, skills and commitment of this wide range of providers is a huge strength from which people in need of advice and representation benefit enormously, but this multifaceted approach also poses a challenge. It can be complex to navigate for those seeking help and the lack of strategic planning and co-ordination can result in inconsistency of access between geographic areas, areas of law and overtime. Legal aid is just one part of this rich but complex and at times inconsistent pattern of provision. The system is demand led, which can make it responsive to changes in need, but there is no mechanism for connecting need, demand and supply or of targeting resources at priority issues or securing a consistent level of service in any given place or for a particular type of problem. The legal aid schemes are themselves complex and can be confusing for the public and for providers and indeed for slab at times. Legal aid should be a means to resolve problems, not a specialist subject in itself. The legislation is approaching 40 years old and even that was based largely on schemes from the 50s, 60s and 70s. The system continues to support many of those who might otherwise not be able to access the services that they need to help them to exercise their rights, defend themselves against criminal charges, challenge those who abuse power or use the law to secure a better future for themselves and their families. However, it would be truly remarkable if a system designed over 70 years ago was able to respond effectively to the range of problems that we see today or encompass what we have learned about patterns of need, about user focus, trauma informed joined up models of service delivery. To do that, the system needs redesigning with current and future needs in mind to provide clear access to advice for the public, a reduced administrative burden for providers and by incorporating a range of funding and delivery models, the possibility of a structure that can attract and retain talented and committed lawyers and advisers. That kind of change needs new primary legislation and we are hopeful that will be forthcoming soon. We look forward to working with partners such as those here today and indeed the committee to shape our responsive, comprehensive and accessible legal aid system for the future. That's great. Thank you very much. So thank you everyone for those introductory remarks. We're now going to move on to questions and discussion and I'll ask Pam Duncan-Glancy to kick the discussion off. Thank you convener and good morning to everyone who's joined us. Thank you for the information you've given us in advance. It's been really helpful and also for the supplemental information you've given just now. I had prepared some questions to ask in advance but I've got a few that have just arisen out of some of the comments which I guess is the nature of the discussion. The first I'd like to focus on is around the areas of information that people are seeking. If it's okay, feel not, if I could come to yourselves in terms of housing and I'll come to that shortly after. In the submission that you gave us, you noted that women experience in domestic violence and I note that Jim also mentioned that. What are the specific issues that you refer to in terms of access to justice and what can be done? In the context of housing and predominantly homelessness it's women fleeing domestic violence and we have seen an increase in that during the pandemic. What we see at Shelter Scotland and regrettably what we are dealing with in the context of homelessness is the breach of statutory duty where a local authority is not providing temporary accommodation where they otherwise have a statutory obligation to. Applies to not just women but that's a general problem that we see. The three main categories of homeless cases that we deal with are local authorities who have failed to take an application or who have taken an application but failed to secure accommodation normally because they don't have accommodation available or lastly it's people who are being offered temporary accommodation but they're challenging the suitability of that accommodation. What options are open to people when they do try to challenge that? The legal remedy there is judicial review, that has kept us very busy recently and there are circumstances where we can't take those cases on because we don't have the capacity. That is a prime example of where somebody will contact Shelter and be given the specialist advice by one of our advisers and those advisers will contact local authorities, there will be advocacy undertaken by Shelter but unless there is a lawyer that is able to take a case or threaten judicial review those cases tend to get stuck or can get stuck. Our advisers do have a high success rate in challenging but I think it demonstrates that there needs to be more than just knowledge of rights. I think also in your submission you talk about the need for the strategic litigation and so that organisations could have standing in cases in the future which tells a bit more about that particularly in relation to the incorporation bill. Okay, so I think here what we've seen again in the context of homelessness we will by the time these cases come to us in the law service we will be threatening judicial review. Most of those cases will resolve at the point of a threat and therefore will not go to a substantive hearing and I think one of the whilst extremely beneficial for the individual concern they get the outcome that they need what we've got here are underlying issues whether it's a practice that a local authority has or just a failure to look at the systems issues but the underlying issues are not being addressed and so we're hoping through the human rights bill that the test for standing is expanded so that there is for example shelter or groups of people are able to take action to challenge these issues if that makes sense. It does, thank you, I appreciate that. Also the point that you made in your submission around the unsuitable temporary homelessness accommodation and the recent I'm just going to get this correct the inner house of court session judgment can you tell us a bit about what that means for the people that you're working with and what we need to do to remedy that. Yes okay so that is a case that was taken by govern law centre shelter scotland intervened in that matter and that was a case that challenged or sought to um it was a case concerning statutory interpretation of an amendment to the unsuitable accommodation Scotland order an amendment made in 2021 that requires local authorities to take into account the needs of a homeless household and the court of session in considering that held that taking into account is not the same as meeting the needs at first instance the court and the lord ordinary had had held that taking into account effectively meant meet the needs and that that was significant because where we have in the case of ex it was a child with autism and it was decided that that child needed their own room it might be a woman fleeing domestic violence who should not be placed in a hostel with men for example it could be people who are recovering from addiction again who will say they don't want to go into a hostel type accommodation these are needs that are not otherwise protected or covered by the remainder of the unsuitable accommodation order so shelter scotland i remedy i suppose the decision in ex the outer house would be to amend the legislation and substitute taking into account needs with meet the special needs thank you and i'm going to pick up i think some of the kind of strategic litigation in a second when i'm as i move on to to my next kind of line of questions around debt if that's okay jillian if i could maybe bring bring you in on this the debt appears as one of the the main reasons that people seek either advice or the main reason that people use civil civil remedy can you tell us a bit about what kind of support you think people need just now where and where the gaps are and then i'm also interested sorry to a few things here i'm also interested in the model that you described through citizens advice scotland and the model that rachel you described through the govern law centre it would appear that we kind of basically need both of those things to be available across the piece so there's advice available as well as legal advice available and that could begin to address some of the strategic strategic litigation issues so that's a slightly broader question but i just because we're talking about the strategic litigation and the general question there i thought i'd mention it whilst i'm asking jillian about debt as well as the the other question jillian thank you um i suppose historically um the debt is one of our biggest advice areas um in terms of the largest advice area that um people see good writing system is network of intensive benefits and then it tends to be debt um what we saw in terms of december our data we actually saw energy advice overtake advice on universal credit and i think that gives an indication of um what we're seeing in terms of debt and relationship utilities um as well as now kind of coming up um the agenda and we're also seeing increases in um advice on food banks and also um around face eviction and sort of home deposition um so it's it's it's across a number of issues that people will come to the network for advice related to debt in terms of the kind of service delivery model a degree um with palm dunk and glance that there's a need for both ballistic advice um to individuals and increase vision of legal advice through increased supply and access to practitioners i think both are needed i think in terms of the advice sector um it's a very good method of early intervention and prevention and triaging to understand if an individual does need to seek legal advice or whether they can solve their issue without um that the advice look at legal practitioner thanks and i think palm was looking were you looking for Rachel to say a few words on that as well so the the law centre model that goes from advice up to lister advocacy level when i'm talking about strategic litigation that that's kind of what i mean that we can go from you know an advisor who's speaking to 10 clients a day or across an organisation those cases can be filtered through quick quickly and in terms of suitability of accommodation we can start to initially review them really quickly rather than trying to look for outside legal advice that could take it apply for legal aid quite often you've already got legal aid from your advisor level you've got all the details already you've spoken to the client you're looking to just move it and progress it quickly if there are reports that say that accommodation is unsuitable we should be moving fast it shouldn't be accepted that there are kids living in unsuitable accommodation and i think to put the colour to it or context to it the cases that we're seeing can reflect but you were seeing Fiona about children with autism and these families the one i've got in my email right now is a family that is in a high rise flat with a sort of window that's a bit like a balcony and she's got countless reports from medical professionals that say that that child has tried to jump out of the window and there's a huge risk and a huge concern there but that's a case that should be moved on really fast and if there isn't the resources there then you can't do that to judicial review very quickly and you've got all these waiting lists of unsuitable accommodation so that's part of the housing crisis but if you've got more investment in that sort of strategic work then you know if there's a funnel of all these cases going through then it can only help to show that more investment is needed in that housing sector. Do you mean in terms of legal aid or do you mean in terms of the availability of lawyers and solicitors or both? Maybe a bit of both but actually we've found that in terms of those cases legal aid is usually granted actually so it's just a case of filtering those cases through to their relevant legal professional but then to do judicial review you need someone with rights of audio and senior an advocate to be able to draft that application to get it into the court session so unless we feel very powerful in our organisation to have that but there's many that most don't and if you don't have a referral route to be able to get that advice and advocacy in place then these cases just aren't getting taken and we do have some success with the threat of judicial review but I've found that you need to be able to act on it because you're speaking to the same lawyers in the legal team so unless you're then following it through by acting fairly quickly by showing you've got special urgency legal aid in place to take that forward then that's the time where I think that the client is is provided with relevant accommodation. You said that you feel quite lucky because you've got access to that provision. How did you? In Govan Law Centre we've got Mike Daley's the principal solicitor and he's a solicitor advocate so he has the rights of audience necessary to draft the paperwork and appear in the court of session so we can go from advisor level which is someone speaking on the phone sifting through these cases I'm across from her so I'll speak to her about how unsuitable accommodation is so it can move to me fairly fast and then it can go to Mike Daley fairly fast to get that to court and it feels like that is how we get through these cases and get people in suitable accommodation but that the case of that case that Fiona and yourself we're talking about it we're talking about that was such a boon for housing lawyers to see that what we have been arguing for for so long that there's an absolute duty there to have someone in suitable accommodation that has given all of us you know that power behind us to keep taking these cases and it's not about resources it's about providing that house that's suitable for a family or an applicant's needs thank you convener will I move to the next day I'm going to let somebody else come in and you can come back into that other area convener would you maybe want to let Karen in so I don't want to step in any toes and then I'll come in after Karen it was more in terms of the access to services all right okay area sorry sorry folks sorry I was going to come in on the domestic abuse I apologize for that and that's one of the the risks with an informal round table totally messed up there anyway thanks very much and good morning everybody yet in terms of services obviously there I think Pam Duncan-Glancy touched on it a wee bit there's probably a question for yourself Rachel initially and then maybe yourself Jim I'm a lamercher MSP and I notice that there is a difference of services across the country so for example I think yourself Rachel is only dealing with people with a Glasgow postcode is it correct and therefore if you take maybe Lanarkshire which is close to Glasgow they don't have a similar sort of service and your own services very well known about and thought of I have to say as well so I just wonder what do you think about that provision of services across the country what more can we do what can this committee do in conjunction with the Scottish Government or or other partners to ensure there's a there's a consistency of service across the whole the whole area the whole the whole country sorry as go mainly the northeast and the south of Glasgow and absolutely we get contacted as I'm sure other organisations do almost on a daily basis big people looking for advice particularly actually by online like twitter or something that people get in touch with is asking if we can take on a client and we don't take on those cases routinely but we do act on a pro bono basis if we think there's got there's some strategic element to the case that could have a wider benefit and but certainly in terms of who we would refer to there you know we're saying go to the law society see if there's a local lawyer that we able to take that on citizens advice bureaus but other than that law centres are predominantly in Glasgow so there's even we feel that we can't we're under resource we feel that we can't take on the necessary cases that we want to never mind elsewhere so in terms of what you can do about it which was your question don't want to keep banging on about it but more investment you know the law centres in Glasgow are kind of full to capacity in terms of the case work they take on and it's it's not really good enough to just take on the or to to rely on taking on strategic cases outside the Glasgow area is on a pro bono basis it's not not sustainable so i guess you'd need significant investment to widen that outside Glasgow yeah thanks Richard Jim has one thing i can ask you the same sort of question but widen it out in your juice do you think there's any particular challenges for people exercising that there's human rights in combat and discrimination yeah i think the problem arises and i alluded to it is the newly qualified solicitors who are leaving this area so there's a plenty of people who leave university and want to go into legal aid traineeships but then when they when they qualify they look for a better work life balance and the workload that legal aid lawyers are facing and certainly secondary trainees are facing it's a heavy workload and it's too heavy for them to sustain and that's why firms have to turn away business because they can't deal with it even though they may be coming from Scottish women's aid or somewhere like that and we feel very hard pushed about it but we have to address this problem and i don't know how we address the problem it's it's a gender-based thing as well a lot of women leave the profession in the early years and we need to address that problem now i think it's across the board we have to address the problem i know colons got views on this as well but it's the whole justice system has to look at it and say how can we retain these people because if we retain the people they're available to give advice but these are also the people that will end up being sheriffs and judges and administering the law so it's important that we open up this and discuss this not just on a money basis but work-life balance basis so a civil legal aid lawyer if you get their business card will have their mobile phone number on it they're available 24 seven almost but they alone can't deal with what's coming through the door and this is the problem there is and during the court during the pandemic virtual courts were used which certainly helped in relation to rural areas that they could get access to the legal profession there are problems with the virtual courts and the major problem is you've got to have effective participation about with the parties who are involved in the action that may be that the solicitor and the client are in the same room because the solicitor has to encourage the client to speak up and state their views there's no point in having an online court or virtual court if the person is not participating effectively so these are the areas that we could look at and could progress which would greatly help the situation and they could be built into a further review of you know the the review body could also look at these issues as well and this is why the law society are very keen to get a body maybe an independent body to look at these things and so to ensure that we have enough solicitors to meet the need that is overwhelming at the moment. I'll be happy to leave it there. Jen is keen to come in and I think that Karen is looking for a supper in this area so. Thank you very much convener. I just wanted to quickly take the opportunity to answer both questions that have been raised both Pam and Fultons in relation to what are some of the issues we could look at and ensuring a consistency of high quality provision across Scotland in a specialist area. By speaking a little bit about the Scottish Women's Rights Centre which is funded to provide advocacy, legal information advice and representation across Scotland for women fleeing gender-based violence. The Scottish Women's Rights Centre is a collaboration between Just Rights Scotland, Scottish Rift Crisis and the Strathclyde law clinic and it has been running for a number of years and it's grant funded so it's core funded in a way that makes it a good model to examine, it's unusual as a response. We have advocacy workers working alongside our solicitors and legal case workers and we've worked to use that advocacy base in order to provide more information about legal rights and information to people at the front or what we call early intervention to legal advice. We have a Scotland-wide remit which has been really challenging. I think that it's one of the reasons why the project was seen as promising to be funded but I think that we're in a really good position to tell you about some of the gaps and some of the challenges that arise here that will arise in other areas of law that are specialist. So what we've seen is that we can provide through rape crisis networks but also women's aid networks as much great kind of front-line information about people's rights as possible but there is a restriction, there's a bottleneck even for us when it comes to referrals for individual legal advice and representation. There is a bit of responsibility that we bear here when we're advising people who are seeking to escape abusive and exploitative situations, when we advise them that they have rights and that our statutory authorities will conduct themselves in a certain way. If we do not provide them not the support but the legal advice and representation that they need to engage with those systems, we are letting them down. As an example, a woman who is fleeing a situation of domestic violence in the central belt as compared to someone who is fleeing the same sort of factual circumstances in a more remote area may be able to access in-person support through advocacy locally, may be able to access our services remotely, which has become a more frequent and more accepted approach. But there will come a point where it's not possible to deliver a person-centred trauma-informed model to meet with that person again and again and again, perhaps even in the steps preceding her decision to exercise her legal rights. It may not probably will not be possible to find a lawyer that is a safe distance that isn't linked in to her communities to see her. That is simple inequality and that difference will have real impacts in women's lives across Scotland. Some of the things that we have looked at or that the centre is doing to address this problem probably illustrates the strategy and our approach. As I said, there can be lawyers across Scotland who would like to work in a more trauma-informed approach and who would like to be able to take some of those cases and have the skills to do that. The Scottish Women's Rights Centre does now run a training and accreditation programme, which is relatively light touch, but it is aiming to create a network of lawyers or to upskill lawyers across geographies who feel confident to do that work, but it is only a partial answer. However, the second longer-term piece and it is something that we cannot address alone, and it is what Jim has spoken to, and it is what Rachel and Fiona have spoken to, is that unless you fund specific people to do this work, we cannot magic up the capacity in already stretched firms. As much as people are willing, they are right and they are acting within their ethical obligations to not take on more case work than they can handle, particularly when those are complex, high-contact hours cases, as they should be, because people in those situations deserve that intensity of advice. I know that that was a bit of a meander, but I hope that it starts to explore some of the impacts of those questions. If we were to look at how we measure our success, it would be ultimately being able to run a survey Scotland-wide, asking people if they have had particular legal issues to engage with, and then asking about the quality and the speed and the rights and firmness of the response that they were able to obtain no matter where they lived. It was just something that you spoke about there, Jim, in regard to women's participation in legal services and them dropping out. We recently had a gender-sensitive audit of the Parliament, and my colleague Maggie Chapman was on the board. We were looking into the participation and the barriers that women face in politics as a whole in the Parliament, because we know that the better representation of women here, the better women are served across Scotland. I wonder whether that would be considered to do a gender-sensitive audit, because we know that a lot of the issues that we are hearing this morning do disproportionately affect women. The Law Society did a survey of its members. The last survey was done in 2018, and they are currently preparing for a further survey. I will feed back into those issues that should be done, but it is quite a broad survey. The difficulty sometimes is the structure of the court system that is a barrier. I know that we are talking about civil proofs, and we have run for a period of time. It does not help with hybrid working if you want to only work certain days of the week or prefer to work certain days of the week. It is very difficult if you have a six-day proof that is set down before a court. It is not just the employer, as in the law firm that faces the problems, but the court system itself. Sometimes it is seen that you have to do such proofs to progress through a firm. I do not particularly subscribe to that view. I think that people should be progressing according to their ability, and there should not be any barriers to that. Certainly, the Law Society will look at barriers and try to address barriers, and their latest survey will do that. I would like to come in. The points that Jim Mayer made are well made. It is an issue that we have been aware of for some time in discussions with the Law Society, the Government and the faculty of advocates. That group is considering some work around the future of the profession and trying to identify what barriers or challenges there might be and how they might be overcome. The structural barriers that Jim Mayer has mentioned in relation to the wider operation of the criminal justice system or whether there are things about the way in which services are structured, delivered and funded that could help to address some of those issues. We have a legal aid sector that is predominantly small firms. Many of them are one- or two-person firms. In fact, more than half of the firms are one or two people. There are challenges in managing workloads when there are unpredictable features, particularly in relation to crime, where there might be police station work requiring out-of-hours call-outs, but, as Jim Mayer mentioned, there are longer running trials in crime or proofs in civil. There may be a challenge in terms of the flexibility of some of those models of delivery, so it might be that there is a need to look at whether there are ways of supporting the profession generally to address those kinds of barriers and create opportunities. I think that at the moment it is two thirds or so of new entrants into the profession or women. The profession has been over 50 per cent women for a decade or so, but we do see that there is a certain point, particularly in criminal practice, where women certainly come in to that area of work, but they tend to then move on or move into publicly employed positions, so move in house, move into the crown or other areas where they find that flexible working arrangements are more readily available. That can be a challenge in some of the smaller business units that they are traditionally based in. I wanted to come back on Fulton's question to Rachael about the Shelter Housing Law Service as a national service. We will take cases throughout Scotland where we have capacity, but to come back to your question about what could be done, there is obviously an underlying issue and a difficult issue here in terms of resources, and we are all asking for more funding and more sustainable funding avenues. However, there is also a question here of principle, and if we put access to justice on a par with access to healthcare or if we look at it in the context of criminal where we have duty schemes, some of us in the law centre movement offer court advice to those at risk of eviction, but there is not a consistency. Not every single housing court has access to that, and not every tenant will have automatic access to a housing lawyer. What is saddening about that is that we know from the cases that we take, the vast majority of those will be a legal defence, and the vast majority of people who are taken on will successfully keep their homes with that advice, and it is the difference that makes. We know about the social and economic cost of carrying through with an eviction. If we are looking at a new redesigning a legal aid system and looking at access to justice here, it is perhaps looking at identifying those areas where we need to just think differently about it, and why do not people, for sake of argument, at risk of eviction have automatic access to legal advice in the same way that those who are at risk of losing their liberty do? So, just a proposal, something to think about. On this particular theme of access, we know that 100 lawyers have quit the legal aid system. We know that 40 legal aid firms have quit the system. We know that the Scottish Government has reduced the budget since 2007 by £65 million. We have talked about resource, we have talked about recruitment and retaining staff, but I am wondering whether there are lots of solutions around that, but do the Scottish Government, or could they do anything more in their legislative competence or regulatory powers that they have to ensure that we address those issues? On that point, the Scottish Solicitors Bar Association has been very critical about the latest legal aid, which it says does not go far enough to address those recruitment issues. I have talked about the trainees thing, which was very welcome, and it was about £1 million that was spent on the trainees to fund 40 trainees in legal aid sectors. Some of those have obviously gone to criminal and a few have gone to civil. The Scottish Government also announced an £11 million package, which I understand that the regulations have been laid before the Parliament, and Colin Rennie can support me on that, and it will come into effect on the end of April. The situation here is that there have been on-going negotiations with the Scottish Government at the legal aid board about the provision of legal aid. I also sat on legal aid a long time ago, and it has been a constant theme that it has been underfunded. That is one of the major problems with it. When the £11 million came out, it was not welcomed by the law society as a solution. It was a step in the right direction, but what really needs to be done is, and I heart back to my opening comments, we need to have an independent review so that the people coming into the profession can see, like you see with teachers and other professions, that there will be some sort of increase each year, or it will be looked at, the problems that they have about work and life balance are addressed, and the problems that they have about barriers are addressed. That is what we could move forward with. That body does not just address fees but addresses the other issues in the matter. That is what the law society is very keen on, and the Scottish Bar Association is very keen on bringing in. We had a legal aid review, which I think was five years ago now, but nothing has moved forward. I fully understand that the pandemic has taken place, but the thing is that we have reached this crisis now because nothing has moved forward. We need this independent body to look at these things, which can address the funding issues right across the boat, not just legal aid but other funding. I know that third sector who lawyers rely heavily on get funding for short periods of time and not long enough periods of time to fund a whole project. Women's aid groups are always finding difficulty, finding funding to get access to legal provision, so we could look at it in a bigger picture and look at it with some sort of independent body set up by the Scottish Government. That is what I would say, Llywyddyn. In terms of addressing some of the issues with access, it might be a case that the way that the legal aid budget is set up needs to be looked at in terms of shifting focus to more grant funding and contracting to deal with some of those areas where there are supply issues. If it was shifted to more grant funding, it is focused on early intervention and prevention. As Jim touched on, some of the projects that are currently funded that run in citizens advice could be at the moment, particularly in court advice. We believe that those need to be funded on a national basis because, as others have said, not everyone in every part of the country can get access to the same service at the moment. We also think that funding needs to be made more consistent because it is zero on your funding at the moment. That is really an issue for supporting clients, ensuring good outcomes and also job security for the staff involved. That is really a barrier, the funding issue, in terms of access. As I said, we would be the budget overall in terms of using that in a different way to fill some of the gaps and address some of the access issues. That might be a good way to look at that issue. There are two or three different things there. The budget for legal aid is demand-led, and it will fluctuate over time depending on the number of cases that have come through the system, and it will rise if the number of cases coming through rises. We are rising at the moment, and some of that is a bounce back from dips in the pandemic, but by the end of this financial year we will be spending more than we were pre-pandemic. The long-term reduction legal aid expenditure up until the pandemic was largely driven by reductions in the number of criminal cases going through the courts and therefore demand for advice was lower and therefore for spend was lower. What we have seen on the civil legal aid side is that the number of grants of civil legal aid over the past two or three years, even with a slight dip in the pandemic, has actually been pretty similar to the numbers that we saw five, ten years ago, so there is not a huge reduction there, but there are fewer people delivering those cases, acting in those cases. Again, as I mentioned earlier, a large number of the firms that do legal aid work are very small, and many of those firms who have been active and we define active as submitting one or more applications in a year have been at that one or two application end of the spectrum. So there has always been a disproportionate concentration of the work amongst a smaller number of firms who tend to specialise, so the law centres in relation to social welfare law dominate that provision. Generally speaking, and when I say historically, I mean over 30, 40 years, mainstream private sector, private practice, legal aid provision has not tended to do an awful law of social welfare law work, so in terms of housing, for example, it has very much been the third sector who has picked that up. That is why a law centre has emerged in the first place, because mainstream legal aid services were not addressing those needs, and therefore there is a different model identified for doing that, and that is the model that Rachel described earlier. So in terms of what might be done to address any gaps that do emerge, and I would say that again over the last 10, 15 years what we have seen is a change in the types of work that are being done under legal aid. 15, 20 years ago it would be family law and damages actions, so damages actions are barely featured now, because no win, no fee is entirely taken care of that. So it is now family, adults within capacity, Jim mentioned, it is the biggest single area of work, more grants this year than ever, it goes up every year, and that is very widespread across the country. Lots of mental health work under advice and assistance in ABOR for the mental health tribunal immigration asylum work. Those were not major features of the legal aid system historically but have grown over time. So there may still be some gaps in the system, some areas of the country, not necessarily rural, but there may be some parts of the country where it is harder to get help than in others, but, as I mentioned in my introductory remarks, the system is reactive, it is demand led. There are very few tools for us, for the Government or any other body to intervene directly, to identify needs, to look at the patterns of supply, and to then make changes happen where those things do not match up. We have fairly limited grant funding powers and that helps. On the margins, on a number of bodies here, I have received grants from us over the years or still do, but in terms of the balance, if what the public needs is a more interventionist system than a different set of tools are really needed. I think that this is what Jen was saying earlier on, really thinking about what is the system that we want in future that provides an assurance, a consistency of service delivery, rather than just paying for the work that gets done if it gets done. That idea of being proactive, making it our business, to understand the patterns of need and then design services to meet those needs, that is not really what the current legal aid system is designed to do. It cannot be made to do it because the tools just aren't there, but I would agree with others that that more diverse range of models, both funding models and delivery models, is what we need to meet the diverse range of needs that we observe. When you talked about the levers and mechanisms, was it specifically about the funding models and the early intervention? Thank you for that question, Rachel. I helpfully suggested that, if the committee has the powers, it might be interesting to open up a wider look or to press the Scottish Government to speak more to how it seeks to meet its access to justice obligations across directorates and areas of responsibility in a unified way. I think that, as organisations that receive funding from them or are working across the national law centres and organisations such as Citizens Advice Scotland are in a really good position to feed back, but I do think that you will see that across directorates or areas of responsibility, so children's rights versus women's rights versus local government and communities, you will see people recognising access to justice as a component of their responsibility, but not that wider, tying-together conversation about how we could tackle this better. The other thing is to round out your question around what other levers and mechanisms or what could the Scottish Government do within its powers. I wanted to point out that the Scottish Government and the UK Government play an active role in demand for legal services in how they legislate. We have gaps because demand exceeds supply, and lures will tell you in their specialist areas when they see something coming down the pike that this will massively increase demand for legal service. For example, the illegal migration bill is going to massively increase demand for immigration advice services and everyone knows that, and we will not be able to meet it. Similarly, repeated poor decision making by DWP massively increases demand for the work that Citizens Advice does along with CPAC. A lot of that work is done at advisory level because there are not enough lawyers to take the higher level of appeals, but it is Government legislation or bureaucratic decision making that creates that. What is within the powers of Scottish Government includes our judicial processes. There are places where, perhaps, we might move not so swiftly to a court or tribunal adjudication, or there are places where processes could just be quicker, easier or better for people. That would lighten the capacity burden on lawyers. The last thing is that, in some cases, legislative change directly impacts increases or decreases the demand for our services, and here I would defer to Fiona. For example, how housing solicitors have worked through the Covid-19 pandemic and in the return to a higher level of actions is a really good example of an influence that Government wields whether or not the analysis around the impact of legal services happens at the time. I want me to ask my other question very briefly, because it is just to Fiona McPhail. The brief from Schelter talked about digital exclusion. I represent a rural area. In rural areas, broadband can be unreliable. I wondered how individuals find what the impact is of facing digital exclusion to access legal aid. I should not have said yes to you. Do you want PAM to come in as well? Do you want to find out? I can come right after you. My challenge is that PAMDG has another question on that. I wonder if we can hold that. Is that okay? I am just concerned that we are moving or jumping, and PAMDG has a question that is still on access to service. Can we go to PAM? That was my fault. Thank you for that, chair. One of the areas that I was keen to explore with you, particularly yourself, Jen, given the focus of the work that you are doing with Inclusion Scotland around disabled people, 73 per cent of respondents to a survey on the UNCRPD in 2021, the United Nations Convention on the Rights of Disabled People in 2021, said that deaf and disabled people find it hard to get the support if they have a legal problem. The quarter was not sure. It is more likely to say that they have experienced civil law problems, but there are still barriers to getting advice. They cited costs associated with reasonable adjustments, not met by legal aid, to which I will come to your call. A lack of high-quality BSL English interpreters in courts and in police stations, and that disabled people can often be exhausted in this quote here, exhausted daily, so dealing with legal matters is mentally and physically impossible for many of us. So how do you think we could address some of that? Those issues are the same issues that I remember writing a report about when I worked in the independent living in Scotland project in 2015, so it feels like we have not made much progress on that. I am really excited to see the work that you guys are doing, but how do we tell more people about it, scale it up and resolve some of the issues that I have just highlighted for disabled people? Thank you, Pam, for raising that. I can only echo what you have said, which is that this is an area where we are far behind, basically, and we all aim to work intersectionally, but this is an area where the disproportionate inequality or the additional barriers have not been tackled as quickly in terms of ensuring that disabled people access legal advice and representation on equal footing. It is a reason why the Scottish Justice Law Centre partnered with Inclusion Scotland several years ago, because it was identified in the Scottish Government equality strategy as a gap in access to legal advice. I would just say that myself and Heather Fiskin, as the leads on this project, remain frustrated with what we can do on a limited basis to address this gap. The project is funded by the Scottish Government's equality and human rights fund. Fundamentally, we have 1.5 solicitors, and what we can do with that is to focus on, as has been mentioned earlier, the strategic cases. We are looking for cases from our partners that raise wider issues, for example, how local authorities exercise their discretion in reviewing PIP payments. That has a widespread impact on people. We found the right case. We took the challenge and tried to publicise the result. However, in this area, in particular, in disability justice, I would say that referrals that we cannot take far outweigh our capacity to respond. I agree that some of the responses are already known in the very good research work that has been done, things around access to interpreters, but also on a wider basis the legal sector's understanding of what good practice working with disabled people looks like. It is a piece of work that Inclusion Scotland has started, but we have not had sufficient capacity to roll that out. Alongside that, the legal sector prioritisation of disabled people as service users to whom they have obligations. What more can we do? The answer comes back to the Scottish Women's Rights sector. It cannot be just one or two specialist projects across Scotland that do that work. There needs to be a wider push across the legal sector for all law firms to work better. There are probably some specific asks that should be pushed forward and that could make a real difference in the short term. Thank you, Jen. I appreciate that. I could probably go on, and I won't take up too much more time on it, because I know that others have other questions, but maybe just to ask Colin about the issue around legal aids and using that to fund the reasonable adjustments that people might need. That is an issue that we have discussed before. We have looked at over a period of time, and I suppose that there are two different categories of reasonable adjustments. There will be adjustments that might be made in the delivery of the service to a particular client, and if that results in additional costs being incurred by a solicitor, whether that is costs at the incur, so outlays or more time having to be spent on certain activities, then those can be accommodated within the legal aid system, and those would be considered as part of the general accounting that the solicitor would make in relation to their case. It may be that there is a lack of clarity about that. We are involved in a major project at the moment where we are clarifying our policies and practices in relation to all of our decision making functions, including account assessment or the approvals for additional costs being incurred. As part of that process, we are already publishing and we will work through everything to publish our statements of our policy and clear guidance to the profession, as well as the guidance that we provide for our own decision making staff. That should clarify any areas of doubt that solicitors have about what they can and cannot be paid for. If they are in doubt, they should contact us and we can advise them as they are dealing with the case. The other type of adjustment might be to the solicitor's own premises, for example, and those are things that, because of the funding model, we fund case by case. We cannot make any payments in relation to those kind of infrastructural adjustments that might make premises more accessible. That responsibility would lie on the service provider rather than us or them as a business, rather than us as a funder of the particular cases that they deal with. I am not sure which of those two groups was felt to be the bigger barrier, but there is one that we can do something directly about and one less. I suspect both, if I am honest, given the lack of understanding of the profession, about what additional costs might be and what they can apply for. There is probably an issue in terms of access to the services more generally. I do not know if Jim from the Law Society has heard of that. I just want to say briefly that I was glad that you brought up how exhausting it can be for people to try and find a lawyer to try and enforce their rights or to deal with councils or budget cuts or care package cuts. I wanted to mention the way that we deal with it, which is that we have a carers project that is set up with two carers centres. I think that that model has been really effective and really good at keeping that trust and respect. I hear what you were saying, Colin, about being reactive and the adults with incapacity work being greatly increased in legal aid, but the way that it could work really well for carers and people with disabled people is if you have a project that can deal with it holistically. In the carers project that we do, it is a lot of adults with incapacity but also challenging care packages. What we have found is the nature of how we work at a law centre. Quite often, people are dealing with housing issues. They are looking for adaptations to their house. They are looking at welfare rights appeals or cuts to care packages. I just think that it is such a holistic situation that people can have. If you are reacting to it by simply looking at a guardianship application, for example, you might be missing the rest of what is really affecting that family. I appreciate that. I think that that is really helpful. I totally agree with Rachael. A holistic approach is probably the best way forward when a client presents themselves at a law firm and they have various mental health difficulties and other difficulties, and the solicitor tries to deal with that. Because civil legal aid is so specialised now that generally there is a bit of sign-posting within a firm, it may be causing some problems. That is something that we would have to look at. The law society does work with organisations to try and improve access to justice. There is a project that was sold that the law society is doing, which is non-verbal communication, so a harder approach to communicating with clients and doing work like that. It continues with that work, but it would be quite interesting to continue the conversation with Rachael and the Law Society to try and work out how we could maybe have a more holistic approach to that. However, we have to go back to the situation, the shortage of solicitors in this field, which is probably—we have all these access to justice rights, and if everyone knew their rights, how are they going to access those rights if they do not have a voice within the court system or the criminal justice system or the civil justice system. We will now go back to the area that was raised earlier by Rachael Hamilton, but we will go to Pam Gossel to reintroduce that area. Thank you, convener, and good morning to the panel, and thank you for your opening statements. I still feel that Rachael can ask the broad brand question because mine does not cover that, but it does start that question off. Everyone, as you know, has access to digital devices, especially in some of the poorest and deprived areas in Scotland. Given the shift after the pandemic, and during the pandemic as well, to technology and digital services, I would like to know what has been done to ensure that those face-to-face services still exist for those who really need it, and are they aware of them, and is access to them quite easy? I would ask Gillian first, obviously, from the Citizens Advice Board, and then Fiona and anybody else who wants to come in. The Citizens Advice Network is a multi-channel device that we offer to clients. We think that it is important that they engage with our services and advice provision in the way that best suits their needs. We have our public advice site. If people want to self-serve digitally and feel able to do that, that is a good source of advice for people who wish to do that, or perhaps just seek to understand and issue a bit more. However, that face-to-face advice service is provided in the 59 cabs across the country that was also challenging during the pandemic and that was not able to operate. We quickly pivoted to offer a helpline service, which people could phone a central number, and now they are routed to that central number to their local bureau. If the first interaction is telephone, they can then still get the face-to-face locally, which is the basis of the network's advice provision in terms of that local essential community service. We use digital as an augment our advice provision, rather than direct people to digital as a first choice. We believe in channel choice for people who have not channel shift. It should be up to the individual to decide how they wish to engage. If I could just briefly touch on, as it goes, virtual hearings and remote hearings used during the pandemic, we are still concerned and still hear from advisers across the network that the use of virtual hearings can disproportionately disadvantage partial litigants, particularly those that are unrepresented, and those with additional support needs. We feel that that is about choice for the person who is engaging in legal proceedings to decide how to do that in a way that best suits their needs. We do not think that it should be done on the basis of the type of proceeding or anything like that. We think that it should be up to the individuals concerned as to how they wish to engage. We think that it is unrealistic to expect vulnerable groups to engage with virtual services without providing some additional one-to-one support. I suppose that we have heard instances from across the network during the pandemic, when a client attended a virtual procedural hearing, and we shared a determined that there was no jurisdiction and that the case was dismissed and that the client was unrepresented. We did not understand what was going on in those circumstances and there was no paperwork issued after that decision. We think that the virtual nature of those proceedings at the time really compounded that situation for the client in terms of uncertainty and understanding. As I said at the start, we would certainly believe in channel choice for the individual to decide how best to participate and engage with our advice services and also with legal proceedings. Shelter Scotland also offers a multi-channel approach to the delivery of its advice. We have expanded and developed the offer of digital advice. For many people, that one-off advice through our website will help to provide the answers that they need, but particularly in the context of delivery of legal services, to come back to Rachel's question, we find that we need either in-person or telephone-based advice. Throughout the pandemic, we found that we were able to continue delivering our services. Although we might not always be able to offer the face-to-face, I think that, particularly given the vulnerability of the clients we have, they prefer a telephone-based appointment than no appointment at all. However, there is work to be done in this area. We have to recognise digital exclusion in our own data. Shelter shows that most people accessing our website are doing so through mobile phone and not laptop. I think that there are all sorts of issues that we need to continue to look at, and we absolutely need to make sure that we are able to offer face-to-face and telephone-based services. Can I come back on that after the broadband one-year? Colin McNeill would be keen to answer that, if you are probing it. I have something else for Colin McNeill as well. We have done some survey work in the last six to nine months. Of clients who received assistance during the pandemic, either from private practice firms or from our own civil legal assistance office, which operates in Edinburgh, Aberdeen and in Vernais. One of the things that we were wanting to explore was the accessibility of services and the experience of remote delivery. Generally speaking, there was a lot of satisfaction with remote models of delivery. We still offer, as I think most services would, face-to-face services, but what we have seen is people choosing to speak to us on the phone rather than coming in. We still make appointments, but we get fewer no-shows now. We had quite a lot of no-shows for face-to-face appointments, but we are making better contact with people more regularly as a result of doing more things by phone. When we are covering a wide geographic area, that is obviously more convenient for either the solicitor, adding to their capacity, or for the client. It is definitely a huge potential, but it cannot be all or nothing, because there will be some people or some cases or some issues for which it is not suitable. Jen mentioned trauma-informed practice, and there will be certain areas where you would want to see somebody face-to-face, absolutely, but we are seeing people exercising that choice where it is offered. Quite often that is to communicate by phone, by email or by text message in a way that suits them and at a time that suits them. It builds in flexibility, which I think is real positive. Having said that, there is nothing particularly modern about the telephone. It is a 21st century solution, but it seems to be quite effective. I spoke earlier on about the legal aid model being 70 years old and not fit for purpose for today. Obviously, we have so much diversity in Scotland today, and I certainly think that it is not fit for purpose myself, but I know that people have used it. The question on language barriers here would be good to hear from your set of column Fiona and Gillian that do you face or do you see any language barriers to accessing advice or even the legal aid system today? A 70-year-old system back there is not fit for purpose today with the changes. Gillian's point of view is that the Citizens Advice Board is one of the largest advice services in Scotland. Do you see any language barriers? If not, what is it that you provide to help people who cannot speak English and obviously to Fiona? I will start with you, Colin. I suppose that there are a range of different things there. Those who are more involved in direct client provision might be able to better talk about what they experience on a day-to-day basis and what they are able to provide. It is similar to Pam Duncan Glancy's question on what funding is available. We fund interpreting and translating services in relation to casework undertaken by solicitors. In terms of our services, we will offer to translate materials. If that is necessary, we have a number of materials in some of our standard materials in different languages. We have recently launched a customer communication support needs project, in which we will ask those who are contacting us. Most of the contact, I have to say, is through solicitors rather than directly with us, with applicants, but where applicants are contacting us, we will check to see whether they have any particular communication needs and whether that is language or otherwise. We can then make adjustments to ensure that they are able to get what they need from us. However, as I said, it is probably more the kind of front-line services that are dealing with people on a face-to-face or on the phone basis. We would be able to answer that question more clearly. I suppose that, in general, when people are seeking advice on face-to-face from our bureau, if there is a need for interpretation services or information in another language or format, that can be made available so that that interaction can happen as and when. I suppose that, in terms of language, I know some of the national projects that we run, which again are funded differently to do certain things and perhaps serve a certain client group. There has been funding available to create some of those documents in additional languages, but I will not be able to comment further on the details of that today. I am sorry. Just on that, Gillian, do you do any outreach work? Obviously, it is good to have things in obviously different languages, literature and things like that going out, but do you actually do any outreach to go into the communities to say that you have a service that is available and that people are aware of it? Individual citizens of our bureau in different bits of the country will run outreach services in different areas. The majority will have a physical office location in one or more areas, but they will also do outreach to different parts of the country as well. I am happy to come back with a bit more information on that if we provide it with evidence after the session, if that is useful. I just wanted to say from our perspective that I work in Govan Hill, which is one of most diverse areas in Glasgow. We use interpreters all the time and we have a lot of clients that do not speak English as a first language. In particular, they may have someone in their family that speaks English as a first language or a second language and speak it well, but to be able to speak to that person with an interpreter and provide that dignity and respect is really important. There are just two things that I want to say about that. The community law centre model having that physical space in a community for someone to come in, we found absolutely so important over Covid. Quite a lot of the housing associations round us were shut, the doors were closed, they had nowhere else to go and they would come in with letters to us. We picked up quite a lot of cases that we might not have seen before because of other services being closed. In terms of that as well, someone who does not speak English having to upload a number of documents to email to send to us to look at, frankly, is not going to work. Having that physical space to come in to do that is really important. However, the second point that I want to make is a pattern that we have been seeing over the past six months that we are looking to challenge is at the initial advice stage before it comes to us. Whether that is housing associations or the homeless case work team or the DWP, interpreters are not being provided. We are finding that they are being referred to us to get our interpreter. It can be something simple that should have been dealt with at that stage, but instead of getting an interpreter and dealing with it at that stage, they are referring it out. It is simply, as it seems to us, because they do not want to get an interpreter and we have the ability and the experience to get interpreters in place to do that. Jen, you are nodding a lot or you want to come in. I might as well just ask something about Rachel. Similarly to Rachel, for most of my career I worked in immigration in this item, so all of our work on legal aid also required the use of interpreters. I guess I would highlight that this is a question, a follow-on to Pam. As you can be aware, one of the other issues is that the quality of interpretation is not regulated in Scotland. For some languages, it is easy to find an interpreter, but you need interpreters who are competent at legal work, at court work and so on. For some communities, it is very difficult to find an interpreter or to find a suitable interpreter. A client might, for example, have a reasonable request that an interpreter be female for an engagement and, again, to find a person at that time who will work on legal aid rates because legal aid rates do slightly below for interpretation market standard rates. Those can be barriers to providing legal advice, so we will have missed appointments, cancelled appointments or an inability to support someone in the way that they want to because of those extra challenges. We are not here to talk about how to reform interpreting services in Scotland, but I would suggest that other models are available. Even on a city-wide basis, for example, large organisations will commission a block contract to ensure an equality of access to high-quality interpretation. That is something that might ease the burden on small and medium-sized legal aid firms and other places that need that support. I am going to have to agree with you again, because I am just going to quickly say this, I know that we are going to move on. My mother, a couple of weeks ago, went to hospital and my sister was there. My mother can fully understand English, but when it comes to medication, my sister has to step in. She was asked not to speak and an interpreter was brought in. That interpreter, my mum was going for a CT scan and some other scans. It is quite serious that she physically cannot move when she is in that under that equipment. That person did not give that key information to my mum, but my sister heard it and my sister had to intervene to say it. My mother-in-law was in the same hospital that day, and she had the same problem. I know that it is not for this committee, but regulation on interpreters is so important, because that was key information. The action interpreter turned around and said to my sister, oh well, I do not think that it was really important. You are not there to say what is important, and you are there to interpret it. I know that it was not to the committee, but I agree. Moving on, as we have to do, to legal aid reform areas, Maggie Chapman. Thank you very much. Good morning to everybody. Thank you for joining us this morning and for what you have said. We have touched on some issues of what you considered to be required in legal aid reform already, but I want to just explore some of them in a little bit more detail. We have talked about the need for different funding and delivery models, and, Jim, you mentioned the need for an independent body to oversee some of that. I am also struck that the Evans review of 2018 is five years old now, and Jim, you said that very little has moved since then. In the discussion of that review, the review was not persuaded of a need to generally increase legal aid fees per se. Do you think that that is because there is maybe a distinction between civil and criminal cases? Does the civil stuff get maybe left out a little bit in a way that that criminal does not? What is your assessment of where that position of the review comes from? Thank you, Maggie. I am sure that Colin will back me up on this. The criminal practitioners are probably far more vocal than the civil practitioners, and that may be why things happened. The review five years ago went nowhere, because the difficulty was understanding the model and what it was suggesting was dissecting law firms to find out how they financed themselves. The difficulty that the law society has had with this and the non-moving in this is that the legal aid board has so much information about each individual firm. You have heard Colin speak about the small firms, but there are obviously larger firms. They know how many grants of legal aid they have had in different sectors. They know what income they have. They probably know how many solicitors are there. They probably do not know what the rental of their property is. They do not know what their back-up staff is. I fully understand that. However, the answer in relation to a lot of this is not what we are looking at. How do we retain solicitors? The law society has a difficulty in understanding how we retain them. Currently, we have training contracts at the highest levels. We have trainees coming into the profession at some of the highest levels that we have seen for a number of years, but we are not seeing the retention of legal staff within the area that we require in civil legal aid to become experts in that field and provide the access to justice that Scotland deserves. That is the difficulty. It is a broader problem than just money. The law society has been spending a lot of time and energy in relation to legal aid over the past 10 years. It has been very difficult to progress it. I do not know what needs to be done now. I do not think that we need another review because reviews have taken us nowhere. The difficulties Colin has explained that the legislation is way out of date and that attempts have been made with the legal aid board and the law society to move that on and move to maybe a different system. My major concern is that there is an opportunity of making more funding available, but we have to look at the bigger problem. How do we retain staff? I work in a large firm in Edinburgh that has 11 lawyers—some of them trainees, admittedly—but we have seen 20 trainees go through our system in the past 15 years and less than 10% are staying within legal aid. They are going to public inquiries, the Scottish Government, private firms or the prosecution service. How do we address that problem? We are a firm that tries to provide the best working environment. That is why we close down diaries to make sure that our staff are not overworked. However, the problem is that it is a real lifestyle issue. There is a major difficulty here and I do not know really how we can address it unless we get all the parties around the table, including the court service, the legal aid board and other users, to work out how we can do it. Even the Scottish Young Lawyers Association might ask them if they could help us. We engage with all those organisations, but we seem to always hit this barrier—maybe a two-year qualified that they want to move on to something else. Should we consider legal aid a public service? If we had that as a framework in which we are working, bringing all the different elements that you have just mentioned together in a more coherent way, would that help? It would help. I think that legal aid lawyers look upon themselves as providing public service and, clearly, during the pandemic, they took the steps of going into courtrooms and putting themselves in difficult positions. They have helped with the backlog in the court service, they have provided useful steps at every stage during the pandemic of engaging whether it was discussing whether the jury's trial should continue, they have engaged in virtual courts, they have engaged in those things and they provide a public service. I think that that is a fair recognition. The connection between delivery models and funding, where do you see us needing to go? You mentioned the need for primary legislation in your opening remarks. Could you do this and pick that up a little bit more? There are probably two or three different things in there. The first one, thanks to Jim for not taking us down a fee's rabbit hole, because that could then just dominate the conversation. On the back of the Evans review, the Government established a payment panel, an expert panel on that. Gillian was involved in that, as was I, as were the society and the faculty. On the back of that report, the Government is now looking to commission some work to gather evidence about the financial position of the sector and provide a robust baseline for fees, because the issue that we have encountered in our discussions over many years is that the rationale for any given level of fee has been a little bit lost in the midst of time. Therefore, we need to take a step back and base where we are now and moving forward. I absolutely agree with Jim about the need for a regular review on an on-going basis. It is not good for the legitimacy of the system to not have reviews, but I think that that needs to be evidence-based to start with, and then we can build from there. More broadly, there is the fee's question, which relates to how you pay for individual pieces of work or individual cases, and then there is a funding question about how you support the service in general. There are lots of different models for that that others have mentioned. There are ways in which you can deliver that funding, whether that is yes through case by case, paying for individual posts, paying for a service through grant or commission or a contract, all of which would change the basis on which funding was provided and enable that funding to be directed at particular needs or particular services in particular places. On that, one of the other striking things from the Evans review was the need to shift to a more citizen-centred system. What would we need to do with our funding models and the funding landscape to achieve that citizen-centred approach? At the moment, and what Martin Evans identified and what we absolutely agree with is that the pattern of funding is not based on any assessment of need or priorities or outcomes that we are trying to achieve, it just responds. The money that we spend, so this year it will be £131 million on services, is determined by individual acts of assistance provided by individual solicitors in firms up and down the country, and the decisions that they make about which cases to take on or which cases they cannot take on. Of course, individuals' decisions to seek advice, but that is a complex process. I think that we lack that clear understanding of the overall level of need and the outcomes that people are seeking and where there is a gap between need, demand and supply. Therefore, that more interventionist model to try and respond to that, understand it in the first place and then align funding with stated priorities with outcomes in mind rather than outcomes just arising by chance. What if there were the right to legal representation if you were about to lose your house? Is that the kind of thing that we could draw into that model of understanding? It is exactly the sort of thing that the current system cannot provide. It doesn't provide entitlements. There are schemes and there are eligibility tests, so you can be eligible, but you don't have an entitlement to any particular service. Decisions would have to be taken somewhere about where those priorities were because, as we have heard, there are lots of competing demands. Ultimately, resources are going to be finite and choices will have to be made somewhere along the line. However, if a decision is taken that housing advice for those who are at risk of eviction is an essential and must be provided, you need to have mechanisms to make that so rather than hoping that it happens. I wonder if I could bring you in for your comments on the kind of standardisation or the inclusion of a right to legal representation along the lines that Colin has been describing. What would that require or how would that change us having to think about legal aid from the way that we currently do? Thank you very much, Maggie, for that question. I agree with the last part of Colin's description of the change that needs to happen. There needs to be a wider discussion beyond how SLAB works or what the Scottish legal advice board budget looks like. I am just aware that there was not Fiona. I would invite Fiona to comment after if she wishes, but I think that one approach could be treating legal aid as a public service and looking at a right to a certain level of advocacy, legal advice or legal representation in relation to certain decisions or in relation to certain life situations. You can assume that, in many other cases in which shelter acts, people would be facing an issue that we want to prioritise, but it is not meaningful to have a right to respond or a right to request review of a Government decision without the support and legal advice that you need. Other areas that we could look at, some of them arise from UK Government processes and not Scottish Government processes, but I think that the work around benefits as well as some of the work that debt advisors do that actually start to exceed the levels of competence in terms of needing legal advice and representation, but that is not being available. Those are social justice areas where we could examine how that is currently being provided and whether we could provide a guarantee across Scotland of an equal level of service. It would be like a health service response to particular issues. That is helpful. I have referenced you a few times. Do you want to come in and then I have one final question? I will keep it brief in the interest of time. Thank you very much, Maggie. Legal aid is a public service, absolutely. I think that it is the way that we want to start thinking access to justice as a fundamental right. I will offer to come back to the committee further because there was research conducted a number of years ago and I am trying to remember when, but for every £1 spent on legal aids, there is the X amount, £10 saved, and housing. Shelter recently published evidence on the cost of eviction. We are talking around £15,000, if not more, cost for an eviction that is normally worth less in debt. There is something here about taking a step back from the issues and analysing it differently. I am focusing on housing, but there are many aspects that we need to revisit. Why is access to justice not as important as access to healthcare? Why do not we recognise the importance of intervening at that early stage? We do it in the context of criminal with good reason, but is this an opportunity to look at particularly with the human rights bill coming down the wider socioeconomic rights? I will leave it there. I will offer to come back with further evidence. That is really helpful. I think that that question is a big question for us to consider, but it is really important. My final question, if I may. Rachel, in your opening comments you said thinking about the strategic work that we need to do around legal aid, we need to move the boundaries of equality's law. I was struck by that and I am just curious to know a little bit more about what you mean. I mentioned earlier about working for the Carers project, and we do a lot of work with the Carers Centre. That level of trust means that we get a lot of cases brought to us for guardianships or normal adults and capacity work, but it also means that we speak to the clients about other issues that might be going on. We have a wide cache of clients that we speak to that we can then get a sense of patterns of injustice or patterns of where discrimination is lying. It is meant that we have been able to look at something in particular, such as cuts to care packages or deductions from care packages. We can then use equality's law to try and—there is not much equality's at cases in the courts—and if we can then try and use strategic litigation to move the boundaries on something, that will hopefully start to progress equality's law more generally. In some ways, that ties up to Fiona's last point about looking at rights in the round and making sure that we are linking into the expectations that all citizens should have of what they can expect from services, whether that is a legal service or any other public service. I could go on, but I probably should not. I am keen to now go to Karen to cover the topic that Fulton introduced at the start of the meeting. Thank you, convener. I am sure that Fulton will be able to come in with his other hat-on in regard to justice committee. Since I became an MSP, I have had a few constituents approach me in regards to their concern that the court system was being used to abuse them further in regards to abusive relationships, whether that was physical domestic violence or coercive control in relationships. It has ranged from one partner receiving legal aid and financially draining another partner. There has been looking into this and reading a bit more about this, we have seen that there are ex-partners who have been able to cross-examine partners who they have abused, who they perhaps even had restraining orders against them, and that has been allowed to happen within the court system. It just seems to be against disproportionately women that are affected by this. I am wondering if that is something that you are aware of, that you are attuned to and what can be done about it. I am wondering if you are not in there, so I will pick on you first. That will teach me to nod. The Scottish Women's Rights Centre works in the area of civil cases and justice only, but one of the issues that they have looked at and occasionally commented on for a long time is the poor co-ordination between the civil and criminal justice systems for women who are fleeing gender-based violence and trying to identify areas in our justice system or laws that lead to situations that you have suggested. The use of a process that is open to anyone but in a way that appears to be abusive and in a way that courts are unable to address. What I would say is that I am also on the women's justice leadership panel, which is about to conclude a year-long survey of some key issues around the experience of women across the justice system. I think that what is needed here is an individual issue by issue analysis of pragmatic changes that we can make. I think that our observation across the piece is what you said is right, and we see that in our practice, but there is a careful balancing act in terms of ensuring that the process does not change because someone is using it abusively but that the process does change so that our systems of justice cannot be a mechanism in this way. I will add, because we are here, that there are barriers in accessing legal advice through the legal aid system for women as well as for surviving violence. That is something that we have raised and could raise again, but there are perhaps some areas where, for specific types of actions, the rules should be changed slightly. Fundamentally, what you are asking a woman to do is to defend with her own money or her family's money a matter that is in the public interest, even though it falls on the civil side and impacts on herself and her family. I will add that as well. That could be one of those systemic changes. Again, that broader access to justice focus and what we want or aspire to as a community should be maybe a more key element in how we evaluate legal aid that is available for people. Really helpful. Thank you. Is there anyone else who wants to come in on this? Was there anybody else who wants to come in on that kind of area? So, Pam, you were wanting to comment. Thank you, convener. I just still want the subject of domestic abuse. Oftentimes, women who are fleeing domestic abuse, and as it has been mentioned today in the committee, are temporarily homeless and are often without access to finances. It is sometimes the case that their abusive partner controls the finances. The third sector is really good at supporting mechanisms for these women, but at times, when they are either trying to access advice and services, for example in private, without their partner knowing what barriers currently exist and how we can remove them to have the advice system to help them more and obviously the courts as well. It is quite open to anybody. I am happy to come in on that. We have a women's project that goes into the Simon community in town in Glasgow. That project has been really successful because it is run by two female solicitors, but we also have a lived experience case worker that was brought in under a project as a soft advice in terms of speaking to a lawyer, applying for legal aid, asking lots of questions, trying to get the details, challenging whatever housing decision that needs challenged, but the lived experienced women can provide such a different level of advice and assistance than a traditional legal relationship can. That is something that is certainly given law centre, looking at pursuing and different funding applications going forward. That sort of bridge between the solicitor and the client and the technical questions that we have to ask and the other questions that they may be more comfortable asking someone in a different perspective. We have regrettably had clients in cases where the women in the context of homelessness are not able to get out or access those services. Our primary concern is making sure that she has a safe space and somewhere private and confidential to get the legal advice. That goes back to the fundamental point that Shelter Scotland is saying that we need to make sure that our homeless services are adequately resourced. No women fleeing domestic violence should go back to the abuser, let alone sleep in her car to access the legal advice that she needs to get before accessing that statutory service. That is something that we have come up against women who are not able to. We have real concerns about making sure that they have the space to not just get the one-off advice but engage with us so that they are not in an abusive environment. I have one more question. It is quite open. I have a few cases. It is on the same area. I have a few cases talking about the financial side. More times, it is a woman who does not have that kind of cushion of finances and is out there at home. There is a domestic abuse criminal side going on. There is a broken bridge between a civil case and a criminal case that we are finding that one does not talk to the other to what is happening. Both cases are taken separately. Is that something that people have dealt with? Like I said, the case that I am dealing with right now, the lady has basically come forward. Her finances have all stopped, but she is in a civil case in courts on that one. The criminal side is a domestic abuse that is actually hurting the women. It is just not joining up. There are quite a few that have come back to me to talk about that, but they are both different. Is there anything that... I can go to Fulton first, because that was the... Sorry, Fulton. No, it is fine. It all feeds in, but if we get from Fulton first, we can then get folk to come in. I just tried to catch the conveners' eye there, because my question might supplement yours and then they can be answered together. In my other committee role, I sat in the Justice Committee, and last week we done a wee bit of post-legitim scrutiny work around the domestic abuse bill that was passed in 2018 in the last parliamentary session. Obviously, that was around about coercive control and criminalising that. I wanted to ask how that is overlapping with some of the work that you do around domestic abuse in moving on from Karen's point and Pam's question about if you are seeing any overlap between coercive control now being more recognised as a form of abuse, and then that getting into the civil courts as well. Is there any thoughts on, if there's been overlap there, if you've picked up on that in your work, and hopefully that helps to supplement Pam's direct question, which you've got a specific case you're referring to? So we're wrapping up quite a lot of things in this, which is good. Gillian, do you want to... There's a lot there, so just answer whichever bits you want, and then we'll see who else wants to come in after. We do have queries that come to us related to advice on domestic abuse. Our public advice site has the quick closed function on those pages, so anyone that is accessing that advice digitally can quickly close that down if someone else was in the vicinity and could see that on the screen. In terms of the point about the justice system and the courts on this issue, I suppose it's not so much the courts issue, but we have seen, I suppose it comes back to the legal aid and the access to practitioners element in terms of, you know, a client, we've had a case, you know, a client, their ex-partner has pled guilty to charges of domestic abuse, and she's then trying to sort of evict the individual and children from the home and just the inability to sort of seek a legal aid practitioner that will take on that case or on that individual. And again, that comes back to the point about should there be other considerations, you know, when somebody in that situation, for example, is trying to find a practitioner to act in those circumstances. There is an overlap, clearly, a lot of cases. I'm a criminal practitioner actually, so there's an overlap generally with civil cases. So Pam, we do get the overlap and it's quite interesting because there's a case I've, the law has changed in the criminal law that where a party wants to recover the complainers medical records, she has a right to be heard now in the criminal courts and that's a big overlap because that's a power that's been used and with the legislation coming on that there will be more powers. I don't know if they're all reflected in the civil courts and I think that that's something that's being looked at. So for instance, you've had the Dorian review which looked at the methods of giving evidence, whether it's behind a screen or prerecorded evidence and stuff like that. I think that that is being looked at to bring into the civil field which will give further protections which there are there and there is work being done on bringing them into the civil field if that assists. Just very quickly, I think that the point raised by Pam about the disconnect between civil and criminal justice systems is definitely something that is a live issue in probably most of the legal case work that we run through the Scottish Women's Rights Centre. What I would say is that I'm sure that the women's justice leadership panel is due to report at the end of March and there is most likely going to be a chapter on the evidence that was taken and some of the recommendations so that could be something to look at for those of you interested in that issue. In relation to coercive control, again those reforms were supported by the women's rights centre and that is an issue that we continue to see and I'm relatively sure that our evidence was that this is a start but that there's still a good deal of work around an understanding of that crime as well as really what we're still asking, the kind of evidence we're still asking people to bring in order to effectively make out the crime. I think that our position was that it's a step forward but that alone is never going to be the solution. I think that wider initiatives like raising awareness of economic abuse with banks for example are other areas where we can work effectively to kind of spread the net rather than just create a better remedy if that makes sense for people. The very very last thing Pam in terms of what else we can do and what other barriers there are is just a reminder that we need to work intersectionally. What you raised earlier, barriers for people for whom English is not a first language, barriers for disabled women accessing those services and legal advice, including Scotland did a really good piece around the double barriers for disabled women surviving gender-based violence. The last thing is just to remember that also people face barriers because of their migration status so we had this evidence throughout Covid-19 and the cost of living crisis but being NRPF is itself an additional factor that would make you more vulnerable to exploitation and abuse but also less able to access legal advice. Rachel, can I just check that you get the answer you needed around the broadband? Well I did in a kind of a broad sense, broad band sense perhaps. It's fine, I can leave it, I think I've made my point and if I need to I can follow it up. Okay, thanks. Maggie? Thanks Joe for indulging me. I remember Colin that you said in your opening remarks that legal aid should be there to solve problems and to support people to solve problems not become a specialist area in itself. Can you just elaborate on that because I think that that's actually quite interesting given actually the conversation we've just had around the specialisms required for dealing with certain legal aid cases? Just curious in your views. It's a complex system so the legislation is complex, the regulations run to, I don't know how many hundred pages, the guidance associated with that is fairly intensive as well so I mentioned the project where we're trying to clarify all our guidance but what we're trying to clarify is a perhaps overly complex system so it'd be preferable if the system itself were simpler. There are lots of nukes and crannies in the system that practitioners need to be aware of or their clients need to be aware of whether that's in financial assessment or the particular permissions that are required to take certain steps or in the billing for work and if you're not fully aware of that then there are tripwires that you can fall over which can result in it taking longer to get legal aid or work not being done or work not being paid for that's being done because the proper processes weren't followed so that's really what I'm getting at is if we can streamline and simplify that process it makes it more understandable to people so they can maybe get a clearer idea of whether they are likely to qualify because that's complex in itself and if so what the process is what information is needed so that that can be done first time rather than after multiple interactions because we do find some people drop out of the system while we are in the process of making a decision just because we have to go back and forward so often so a simpler more streamlined system should be more accessible and more people should know that they can access it better for everybody. That's been a really interesting session we've I think covered all of the areas that we were hoping to touch on and there's obviously lots for us to consider as we would take our work in this area forward but that concludes the formal part of business for today so now we're moving to private to consider the evidence that we've heard. Thank you.