Access to justice in social security and social welfare: barriers, retrograde policies, but cause for optimism?

This paper addresses the limits placed on access to justice in the context of social services, with a particular, but not exclusive, focus on the United Kingdom, across five central platforms: legal representation, the financial barriers, the structure of the programme, the attitude of the bureaucracy and the personal attributes of the client. The paper finds that there exist, for decades, problematic elements that constitute barriers to justice in this area: the means tested element in the programmes and the bureaucracy’s double role as provider of services and detector of fraud. But to them, in recent years, significant barriers were added: recent cuts in legal aid the imposition of tribunal fees in the UK are retrograde steps, reverting 40 years of impressive achievements in the field