Legal aid cuts deprive parents of human rights, says former top judge

A former president of the supreme court has said parents are being deprived of their human rights by having to fight for access to their children without lawyers.

- Emily Dugan

David Neuberger said that "taking away legal aid from family disputes is wrong in principle" and an affront to human rights.

Since 2013, parents in private child arrangements hearings cannot access a state-funded lawyer, no matter what their means, unless there is an allegation of abuse. Legal aid is still given in public cases where the state is applying to take children into care.

Neuberger, who was president of the UK supreme court from 2012 to 2017, said in an interview with the Guardian: "In this increasingly complex world where laws are almost always more complicated, particularly to a non-lawyer, you need to give people access to legal advice, you need to give people access to courts with a lawyer to represent them. And that's equally true when it comes to divorce and children.

"It's almost disgraceful to give them human rights and then not give them the ability to enforce those rights. Rights aren't meaningful unless they can be enforced."

Neuberger said legal aid needed to be better funded again after cuts by successive governments, the deepest of which were implemented by the Conservative-led coalition.