We too believe access to justice is the hallmark of a civilised society. But what – if anything – does ‘access to justice’ mean? This book is our attempt to answer that question.

The phrase has been devalued by politicians of all colours who have invoked it to sell policies to the public that (at best) pay lipservice to the notion and, on occasion, actively undermine it.

This is not a party political point. As illustrated in the last chapter, it was New Labour's Access to Justice Act 1999 that laid the groundwork for the reforms discussed that had such a calamitous impact on the advice sectors in Manchester, Cardiff and elsewhere.

It is hard to argue with the main intention of that legislation (to impose coherence on a disparate and patchy coverage offered by the civil legal aid sector), putting to one side the reality of its execution (forcing the closure of advice agencies through a crude tendering process).

The legislation also capped the legal aid budget, linking the civil and criminal schemes, creating an artificial crisis in the system. Social welfare law became smothered by a spiralling criminal budget that was fuelled in part by New Labour's law and order obsession, as evidenced by the 3,600-plus new offences created during their tenure.

When politicians and commentators in the press talk about ‘legal aid’, invariably it is in the context either of alarm over its cost or else abuse of the system by lawyers and their unworthy clients ‘riding the gravy train’.

That narrative has now unfairly dominated the public discourse about ‘access to justice’ for over three decades. Legal aid has become a casualty of the political populism that has infected the discussion of all ‘justice’ issues since Tony Blair coined the mantra ‘tough on crime and tough on the causes of crime’.

The one politician in recent years who has been an advocate of legal aid has been Jeremy Corbyn, a doughty supporter of unfashionable causes. His own party dismally failed to oppose the LASPO cuts. Sadiq Khan, then justice minister and now London mayor, told MPs in 2011 that the legal aid budget was “not sustainable, especially in the current economic context”. It was a surprising response.