Express & Star

LETTER: Take care who gets legal aid

A woman is reported in the papers as getting legal aid to fight her council.

Published
This reader questions who should be entitled to legal aid

This woman has turned down seven council offers of accommodation, for various reasons, including too small, too far from parents and her children’s school.

Now she’s claiming the council are infringing her human rights?

This woman has recently served a gaol term for ‘terrorist offences’ and the council declared her intentionally homeless.

The latest offer of a two-bedroom flat was rejected because the council wouldn’t help her paying the rent – her application was rejected as she has savings, so why does this woman get legal aid anyway?

She has also, reportedly, refused to pay rent and service charges on her present accommodation.

She has also been offered a £5,000 grant to help her house herself and her two (same sex) children near to her family.

Last week her claim of human rights abuse was thrown out in the courts, the judge commenting that the council shouldn’t have to pay her bill for rent. Quite right too.

I hope that the legal aid people will now make every effort to reclaim expenditure on her behalf, if she’s got savings she should be made to pay up.

What’s going on with a system set up to help the most needy and vulnerable in our society, that someone like this can exploit it again and again?

How can someone who’s been offered accommodation time and again keep refusing yet still be eligible for more? How can she still, apparently, be eligible for legal aid when it seems she’s playing the system?

Perhaps our MPs could ‘nudge’ the people who grant, seemingly, limitless funds to people playing the system for whatever ends to carry on and on in this way?

After all the legal aid people, like our MPs, are paid from public funds, and surely care should be taken that our money isn’t wasted frivolously.

Mr M Gough

Wombourne