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PARLIAMENTARY WRITTEN QUESTION
Immigration: Legal Profession (14 January 2021)

Question Asked

To ask the Secretary of State for Justice, what steps his Department is taking to ensure that immigration lawyers who carry out their role in a politically motivated way are barred from receiving public funds.

Asked by:
Sir John Hayes (Conservative)

Answer

Every practitioner who provides immigration and asylum advice in the UK is required to be regulated by the Solicitors Regulation Authority or by the Office of the Immigration Services Commissioner. These bodies ensure that high standards of conduct are met and that practitioners act in the best interest of the client.

Specifically in relation to publicly-funded immigration practitioners who hold a legal aid contract, an individual must also be accredited under the Law Society’s Immigration and Asylum Accreditation scheme, ensuring a high standard and competency for practitioners advising on immigration and asylum law.

Legal aid contracts explicitly set out quality standards that govern the standard of advice that providers must maintain at all times in order to continue to perform legal aid work. Such provisions within the contract include obligations to:

  • Act in the best interests of their clients and be uninfluenced by any factor other than the clients’ best interests;
  • Comply with bribery, fraud and collusion legislation and never act in an unethical way;
  • Allow the Legal Aid Agency access to conduct audits and official investigations;
  • Provide files and other material to allow independent peer reviewers to assess and rate a firm.

The compliance of legal aid providers with a legal aid contract is monitored and enforced by a network of Contract Managers within the Legal Aid Agency.

The Legal Aid Agency has various enforcement powers under the contract, including the ability to apply different levels of sanctions, such as suspension or exclusion of individual staff members of a firm; suspension of specific types of work; refusal to pay; and ultimately termination of the legal aid contract.


Answered by:
Alex Chalk (Conservative)
22 January 2021

Contains Parliamentary information licensed under the Open Parliament Licence v3.0.