Leading refugee charity goes into administration, blames late payment of legal aid

A charity that helps refugees has claimed that late payment of legal aid forced it into administration on Tuesday (15 June).

Refugee and Migrant Justice said this would leave some 10,000 people without access to a lawyer.

It called in administrator BDO citing “a cash flow problem created by late payment of legal aid by the Legal Services Commission”.

A campaign led by the Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr Rowan Williams, and supported by civil rights lawyer Sir Geoffrey Bindman, and Julie Bishop, chief executive of the Law Centres Federation, had tried to persuade the Ministry of Justice to intervene to save the charity.

RMJ’s chair Paul Gray said: “It is with great sadness that trustees took the decision to put RMJ into administration.

“It is a brilliant charity which has a justifiably high reputation for the quality of support it gives and we are very concerned about the position of our 10,000 clients, and of our dedicated and highly professional staff.”

He said legal aid payments had been delayed by up to two years and called on the LSC to “immediately to discuss with the administrators how best to minimise the distress and disruption to our clients during what will inevitably be a difficult transition process”.

Gray said a freedom of information request to the Legal Services Commission had revealed that some “asylum providers, doing the minimum possible to advance their clients’ cases, are making massive profits. While this has gone unchecked, quality representatives such as RMJ who spend time with their clients to complete cases are being starved of cash.”

RMJ, formerly the Refugee Legal Centre, was established in 1992 and said it had helped more than 110,000 people since then.

A Ministry of Justice spokesperson said it appreciated RMJ’s work and had given it substantial support to transfer to the current legal aid payment system.

“However, it is also crucial that the government achieves value for public money,” he said. “The fixed fee system introduced three years ago is already being successfully used by the vast majority of not-for-profit organisations in this area of law. As other organisations have successfully made this transition, it is only reasonable to expect Refugee and Migrant Justice to do the same.”