Poor-Quality Legal Advice: Re-Imagining How Immigration Detention Centres Should Run in England.

The High Court of England and Wales in the case of R (Detention Action) v Lord Chancellor , ruled that the Lord Chancellor had acted lawfully due to the way he operated the Detention Duty Advice Scheme (hereafter "DDAS"). The DDAS is a publicly funded legal service provided to detainees in immigration detention centres. Under it, all detainees are eligible to receive up to 30 minutes of free advice from legal representatives. This approach to detention has been critiqued by scholars on the grounds that a lack of time is afforded to detainees. Some research has been undertaken on the lack of availability of publicly funded legal advice in detention. However, existing literature has yet to canvass the issue in relation to the relaxation of the rules in 2018, whereby contracts were awarded to legal aid providers that lacked experience of dealing with detainees. In this article, I address this lacuna by arguing that detainees were hindered from accessing good-quality legal advice as a result of the lack of experience and expertise of the newer providers. Therefore, I will consider ways of remedying the current dysfunctional system. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]