Barry Andrews (Dún Laoghaire, Fianna Fail)

This amendment is to a provision of the Bill that amends the Legal Aid Act 1995 regarding the powers of the Legal Aid Board to waive or reduce contributions payable by the board's clients for its services. Deputies will be aware that the Legal Aid Board does not provide a free service; it requires its clients to pay a contribution.

At present, section 29 enables the board to waive all or part of that contribution. The motivation behind the changes to section 29 contained in the Bill is simply to put beyond doubt concerns which the board has regarding its own power to waive or reduce the contribution payable by one of its clients in circumstances where that contribution has been assessed at a level above the minimum. At present, the board's conclusion is that it does not have this authority. Once this amendment is passed, it will unambiguously have this authority.

Concern was also raised in both Houses regarding the application of the "severe hardship" standard as the criterion governing whether a contribution could be reduced or waived. The choice of language in the original amendment was informed by the language in the current legal aid regulations; this amendment proposes to replace that term with "undue".

This latter expression is more widely found in legislation generally and does not have the extreme connotations which might have been conveyed by, or read by some into, the term "severe". It also better reflects the reality of how the board would operate such a standard. The intention is not to set the standard unreasonably high, while still providing that it would not simply apply in all cases, since it might be said that any request for a contribution would involve some hardship to a person on a modest income, in so far as it would reduce their immediate disposable income.

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