Text 1 Lawyers protesting about cuts don’t attract the same level of public support as doctors and nurses. What goes on in the courts is not widely understood, and most people do not expect to need a publicly funded lawyer in the way that they rely on hospitals. Nevertheless, access to justice is a fundamental democratic right, and the chaos and failure unfolding across the legal system as the result of cuts should concern everyone who cares about justice. Research carried out by civil servants and published in May after it was leaked shows that the disruptive effect of legal aid cuts in England and Wales has spread from the civil courts to the criminal courts, where increasing numbers of defendants are appearing without legal advice or representation, as a consequence of changes including new means tests. More than half of judges questioned for the study voiced concerns about defendants not understanding that a guilty plea could lead to a reduced sentence. The government knows there is a problem, not least because the £ 950m reduction in the legal aid bill in 2016, compared with 2010, was more than twice as much as it expected. But ministers have already delayed far too long in the face of clear evidence that cuts in the family courts have been harmful. Official figures show that the proportion of plaintiffs and defendants with legal representation fell from 60% in 2012 to 33% in the first quarter of last year, and it is not uncommon for one party in a civil case to be represented by a lawyer while the other is not. Some sensible changes have already been suggested in a review commissioned by the Labour party last year. These include a loosening of the criteria for legal aid eligibility to include all cases involving children, and representation for families in inquests where the state is already funding one party such as the police—which represents an essential rebalancing of justice’s scales. The report also made the not unreasonable suggestion that law should be taught in schools. Avoiding costly lawsuits by encouraging people to treat court as a last resort sounds reasonable, and some of the consequences of the cuts were no doubt unintended. But the “simpler” and “more responsive” system promised by the Conservative justice secretary Ken Clarke when embarking on these cost-saving measures in 2010 now looks like wishful thinking at best. The current justice secretary, David Gauke, must act to restore confidence in a damaged system. Legal aid began in the UK in the 1940s with the rest of the welfare state. In the US, a defendant’s entitlement to a lawyer in a criminal case is enshrined in an amendment to the constitution. While the rules in the UK may lack this constitutional underpinning, people are still entitled to access to justice—including lawyers paid for with legal aid.