Scottish Legal Complaints Commission points to service gap between legal-aid and fee-paying clients

It said that where fees paid to solicitors remain low, “understandably client care may be impacted and this, in turn, can result in increased service complaints”.

A spokesperson for the SLCC said: “As the gateway for all legal complaints in Scotland, and with experience of over 8,000 cases, we hope to be able to contribute in a small way to this review. Three top areas of complaint (family, civil litigation, and criminal) overlap with legal aid, and 43 per cent of all complaints involve poor communication.

“As we mentioned previously in our guide on family law for consumers, we are aware that in legally aided cases, work that doesn’t progress cases (such as updating a client as to ‘no progress’) will not necessarily be covered by legal aid funding.

“Our strategy as an organisation is to try to reduce complaints, by sharing learning, and so we hope providing evidence of issues in these areas we may assist discussion of how new models may help avoid them arising.”