Legal Aid as Important for Economy as Hospitals and Schools, Claims New IBA-World Bank Report
Anew report from the International Bar Association (IBA) Access to Justice and Legal Aid Committee and the World Bank claims that improving legal aid services is as important for economic growth as providing functioning hospitals, schools and roads.
The report, A Tool for Justice: A Cost Benefit Analysis of Legal Aid , is the outcome of discussions first started in 2017 about how increased access to justice can be a ‘win-win’ for businesses, the economy and society at large.
More than 50 cost and benefit studies of legal aid programmes from around the world were surveyed for the report, with evidence compiled from civil and common law jurisdictions in Australia, Bangladesh, Canada, Liberia, Malawi, South Africa, the United Kingdom and the United States of America.
IBA President Horacio Bernardes Neto commented: homelessness and unsafe housing conditions.
Referencing evidence from a number of global cost and benefit studies, the report claims that legal aid programmes are as fundamental to economic growth as ‘high status’ issues such as healthcare and education. Not providing legal aid, the report argues, does not save money. The cost of problems left unresolved by a lack of legal aid do not disappear - they simply shift to other areas of government spending such as healthcare, housing, child protection and imprisonment. A study for Canada estimated the cascading costs of unequal access to justice on public spending in other areas (for example, employment insurance, social assistance and healthcare costs) to be approximately 2.35 times more than the annual direct service expenditures on legal aid. Similarly, a cost benefit analysis of a domestic violence legal aid programme in the State of Wisconsin, in the US, found that each prevented incident of domestic violence saved US$3,201 in avoided medical care, mental healthcare, lost productivity, and property damage costs.
Georgia Harley, Senior Governance Specialist at The World Bank, commented: ‘
Cost benefit studies have become increasingly important as governments demand qualitative and quantitative data to allocate social spending more effectively. A Tool for Justice: A Cost Benefit Analysis of Legal Aid offers a practical guide on how to implement a cost benefit analysis of different policy alternatives. The guide offers governments and other policy-makers the tools to gather the relevant data needed to conduct their own cost benefit analyses of legal aid programmes in their jurisdictions. The ultimate aim is to support governments in allocating their resources more efficiently and effectively to close the justice gap.
Lucy Scott-Moncrieff, a member of the IBA Access to Justice and Legal Aid Committee who led for the IBA on the project and report, commented:
A Tool for Justice: A Cost Benefit Analysis of Legal Aid was launched on Thursday 26 September 2019 at the IBA Annual Conference in Seoul. A video of the Showcase session: the economics of justice – using cost benefit analysis to demonstrate the economic returns of legal aid programmes, will be available to view soon.