At the Yorkshire Immigration Practitioners’ Group meeting in April the LSC contracts manager for Yorkshire and Humberside confirmed that (at that time) there were only 13 remaining suppliers doing immigration and asylum work, and that nine had ceased doing publicly funded immigration work since April 2004.

The chronic shortage of legal representation for asylum-seekers due to the drastic cuts in legal aid is starkly highlighted in South Yorkshire. There have been six firms of solicitors with LSC contracts and two not- for-profit contracts in the area since I arrived in 2001, but now there are just three suppliers. There is no provision in Barnsley — site of a Home Office induction centre — nor in Doncaster, a key dispersal area with thousands of asylum-seekers and refugees and the site of Lindholme Immigration Removal Centre.

For asylum-seekers facing torture or death on return to their own country, the difference between obtaining decent legal representation and not is often the difference between life and death. The Government’s swingeing cuts to legal aid will inevitably mean that some genuine asylum-seekers are returned to face persecution.

CHRISTOPHER COLE
Rotherham, South Yorkshire

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