How can legal aid help people with communication or other support needs?

Legal aid can include additional payments to meet the reasonable costs of communication support from the time that legal aid is in place.

This can be for the use of language or BSL interpreters, for example.

To help access to the services of a solicitor legal aid can also meet the cost of:

• lengthier meeting times that clients might need
• travel by the solicitor where the client is unable to attend the solicitor’s office due to disability or ill health.

Solicitors do not normally need our approval to cover payments made to interpreters. In some instances they need to contact us in advance to ensure they have the funding in place for this.

Some criminal legal aid cases are paid on a fixed fee basis. However, the payment arrangements in these cases can be changed to meet the additional support needed for clients with disabilities.

Solicitors can apply to us for exceptional status in these fixed payment cases. If this status is granted by us, the solicitor can charge for all work on a detailed basis and this would result in the solicitor being paid for any time necessarily spent with the client.

Some of the factors that we would take into consideration in determining whether a case is exceptional include whether the assisted person, or any witnesses, may be unable to understand the proceedings because of:

• age
• inadequate knowledge of English
• mental illness
• other mental or physical disability or otherwise.