A new 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.
The report reveals that around 5.1 billion people – two-thirds of the world’s population – lack meaningful access to justice. Lack of access to justice traps people in vicious cycles of poverty, inequality and marginalisation. The burden of this justice gap falls disproportionally on the most vulnerable, including women, children, minorities and people with disabilities. Lack of access to justice also increases the risk of conflict and violence within a society. Legal aid is a recognised way of providing access to justice, but the funding for it is often seen as a drain on state finances.
Referencing evidence from a number of global cost and benefit studies, the report states 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.