The system of government-funded legal aid is in need of overdue maintenance. Compensation for lawyers is often unreasonable. On average, they spend more time on a case than the system allocates. As a result, lawyers do not receive 'fair' remuneration as determined by the government, which in turn endangers the quality of legal aid.

This was reported by an independent commission for the evaluation of remuneration-subsidised legal aid in their report Different Times (in Dutch). Commission chairman Herman van der Meer, president of the Amsterdam Court, stated on October 25 during the presentation of the report in press centre Nieuwspoort in the Hague that there is a 'political problem, which demands political solutions'.

Fair income

The funding standards for legal cases were last measured 20 years ago. The commission states in its report that since then, the laws and regulations have become more complex, making judicial proceedings more time-consuming than when the standards were set. Applicants also demand more from their legal representatives. A third change is that the government itself causes more legal conflicts. In response to an earlier report on legal aid, the government indicated that a reasonable income for a legal aid attorney is about 3,300 euros net (maximum government scale 12).

Poor conditions

The commission, established in September 2016 by then Minister of Security and Justice Ard Van der Steur, placed an important side note beside its presentation: the preconditions of the assignment it was given were incompatible. Those were: no increase in costs, the norm for a reasonable income remains the same, and the hourly rate is a given.

In order to still contribute to a possible solution of the problem, the commission developed four scenarios. In these scenarios, one of the preconditions is left out. This means that in the first scenario, the government has to spend an extra 125 million. In the second scenario, legal aid lawyers have to work more hours to meet the reasonable income. In the third scenario, the hourly tariff has to be reduced. In scenario 4, the type of cases needs to be adjusted, for instance an exclusion of certain types of cases.

What happens now is up to politics, said Herman van der Meer, adding that 'a well-functioning system of legal aid is fundamental to the rule of law. Without good legal aid, the rule of law is only a theoretical concept'.

Statistics

Every year, around 400,000 Dutch citizens make use of subsidised legal aid, because they cannot afford a legal representative (a total of 1.7 million legal cases each year). Approximately 40 percent of Dutch citizens are eligible for a so-called 'addition' on the basis of income. There are approximately 7,500 legal counsel lawyers in the country.

The press release (in Dutch) is available here (download).