Why access to justice is a social mobility issue

ARAG CEO, David Haynes, spoke at the House of Commons last month, to launch Insuring Justice, a report about the significant role that legal expenses insurance plays in the wider civil justice system.

We’ve been working with The Purpose Coalition an organisation based in Westminster that brings together some of the UK’s largest and most successful companies to broaden access to opportunity and increase social mobility.

Much of the discussion around the report has been about case backlogs in the civil justice system and how before the event (BTE) legal expenses insurance can help to reduce them by providing early advice and support to individuals and SMEs.

ARAG alone insures more than 10 million households and millions of businesses in the UK, giving them access to advice over the phone on almost any legal issue and protection against the costs of some of the most common legal disputes.

Our ATE policies play a vital role too. The cases that we insure for our partner law firms often provide a path to justice for people that have been harmed through clinical negligence, industrial disease or some other workplace injury.

These cases tend to impact whole families. Just like the employee made unfairly redundant or the small business owner struggling to recover a debt from a big customer, families are held back by the uncertainty of a long-running legal dispute.

By providing a measure of certainty and helping clients to progress their cases, the law firms that we work with enable them to move on with their lives and their families to take up opportunities that they might otherwise miss.

On an individual level, enabling access to justice can be liberating for families and encourage social mobility. For our wider society, it can also have a small impact on economic growth.

For families and small businesses alike, being caught in the uncertain quagmire of a legal dispute inevitably inhibits spending and investment. Buying a new car, hiring more staff, moving to take a new job and even starting a business or going to university are all decisions that become much harder to take.

This is why access to justice is much more than just a moral issue. The implications of a slow and poorly functioning justice system are far-reaching, and any impact that improves the experiences of families caught up in it, can be liberating.

Our work with The Purpose Coalition isn’t complete. We exploring ways in which the various organisations and agencies that support people and businesses experiencing legal challenges can work together to fill the gaps through which some of them fall.

Legal expenses insurance will only ever be a part of the solution. There will always be legal issues that are unsuited to an insurance solution and people and business that we cannot help.

Nonetheless, the often unseen impact that fair and more timely access to justice has on society and the economy is another reason that ARAG works so hard to make it available to all.