Campaigners in Manchester held a stall in Exchange Square to inform people about the consequences of the cuts and to encourage them to write to their MPs to object.
Manchester is facing a double attack on its advice services. In March a council budget meeting agreed to abolish the council's in-house advice service to save money. But if legal aid is cut too, voluntary agencies that depend on it, like Shelter and the Citizens Advice Bureau, will be unable to operate. The people of Manchester could soon have no access at all to free legal advice.
The government is proposing to remove legal aid funding altogether for debt and welfare rights issues, and to cut a large part of it for family, immigration and housing matters. The government has given no sound reasons for removing legal aid for these particular areas of law. It is probable that they have no real reasons, other than ideological ones. The Justice Select Committee spent many weeks examining the proposals and taking further evidence. It concluded that "the evidence does not provide a sound basis for the proposals".
It is noticeable that the government intends to cut funding for all those legal issues on which working class people tend to most need advice. That is, they intend to cut a service which is mainly used by people who DON'T vote Conservative, people whose opinion they must assume they can safely discount.
But they might find it more difficult to discount the opinion of the people whose work is funded by legal aid. The government's consultation on legal aid got 5,000 responses from them. It is a safe bet that they were nearly all opposed to the cuts. The government is due to reply to the consultation this month.
In Manchester, the council got so many objections to the abolition of the advice service that its scrutiny committee has had to look at the decision again. It will report back on 22nd June.