UK: Called into battle

The Guardian?s public service?s editor David Brindle interviews a ?thorn in the side" of the UK establishment, a 51 year old lawyer, Yvonne Hossack, who has made a name for herself defending the rights of disabled and elderly people who wouldn?t otherwise be able to pay for a lawyer to defend them in court. She deals with up to 700 cases at any one time, 95% of them care related.

To hundreds of families that have faced care home closures or cuts in care provision, solicitor Yvonne Hossack is a saintly figure. To government ministers, local authorities and other care providers, and, it now appears, powerful interests in her own profession, she is a vexatious litigant.

That is probably putting it mildly. Asked how she thinks she is viewed by the establishment, she replies without hesitation: "Hated." This doesn't seem to worry her, and nor has she any intention of ceasing to bring court cases against closures and cuts, as long as she remains able to carry on – even though she faces disciplinary measures and a raft of actions for payment of costs that threaten what remains of her legal practice.

Disabled and older people have too few sources of help for her to desist, Hossack says. ?You can't be any kind of decent human being and say: ?Sorry, old boy, I know I have the skills to do something, but I'm not going to use them for you. I have to think of my own life, my career, my professional reputation.? I don't think I can say that.?

Hossack's modest office in Kettering, Northamptonshire, doubles as her home. In 2004, she had to relinquish her previous business premises, and make redundant her three staff, after heavy trading losses, and at about the time her marriage was collapsing. She now employs a single assistant, David Griggs, and relies otherwise on volunteers to help handle the 600 or 700 cases she says are on her books at any one time – more than 95% of them care-related.

The upside of living on the job is that her clients, especially those with learning disabilities and their carers, feel much more at ease being interviewed by the fire in her sitting room and nuzzled by her dog, Pebbles. The downside, she admits, is that she can never close the door on the bulging case files and switch off.

Hossack is undoubtedly a driven woman, but by what? By a deep sense of injustice at the treatment of vulnerable people, certainly. She is convinced, for instance, that some care home residents die and others suffer lasting ill-effects as a result of being forced to move when a home closes. But she is also driven by the strong Christian faith she has had since she was 13 – she can name the day – and which she practises at a local Baptist church.

"I know that I work to a more ancient set of laws, and just because somebody adjudicates that somebody is right and somebody is wrong, that doesn't make it so," she says. "There is a more perfect judge we will one day all face. And on that day, I don't think he is going to be impressed if I say to him: ?Look, I was a bit worried about this; I was told the state would discredit and bankrupt me.? I can picture his face now, raising an eyebrow and saying: ?What? What's this shit? I told you to go out and help the helpless. Why haven't you done it??"

Pursued for costs
Hossack swears liberally, especially when talking about the parties now pursuing her for costs. There's Kettering council, seeking £12,000 from a case in 2003; there's Gentoo Sunderland, formerly Sunderland Housing Group, pressing for £6,500; and then there?s former lord chancellor Lord Falconer, who wants £8,500 for a "misfeasance" suit that Hossack took against him, knowing full well she had no chance of success but furious over remarks he had made about her legal aid claims.

On top of these, the Solicitors Regulation Authority is looking into reported comments by a judge in a case in Staffordshire about Hossack?s "negligent and unreasonable" action, and, probably most seriously, she has been notified that the Solicitors Disciplinary Tribunal considers she has a case to answer in respect of a complaint by charity Sue Ryder Care about her handling of a failed attempt to stop the charity closing a care home in Norfolk. A date for a hearing will be set in July.

To Hossack, all of this is too much of a coincidence. She claims her problems started in 2003 when she took a client to Downing Street to lobby the prime minister. The very next day, she says, she had a visit from the Legal Services Commission to warn her about her legal aid claims. From April 2005 to December 2006, her legal aid contract was suspended. Although it is now reinstated, and she is able to take on 450 new cases a year, she is currently in dispute with the commission over the legitimacy of spending amounting to £26,000.

Her conspiracy theory is supported by a conversation she says she had with a fellow lawyer under the Solicitors' Assistance Scheme, which offers peer support and advice. "He told me: ?You have been a thorn in the side of the establishment for some years. If you cease your work for disabled people, you will be able to keep your reputation and what money you have left, and will even be allowed to carry on your business. But if you do not, the state will discredit and bankrupt you – there is no escape.?"

Controversy
Hossack undoubtedly courts controversy. At the last general election, she stood as an independent against Ivan Lewis, now care services minister, in his Bury South constituency, winning only 557 votes but spotlighting what she saw as local care cuts. When she recalls a period in her life when she was a Labour party activist, it's somehow unsurprising that the story ends with her alleging corruption in the local party and being accused of bringing it into disrepute.

She has to deploy the widest possible armoury of tactics, she argues, because the law itself offers little purchase for fighting back against care home closures and cuts. While she welcomes the government?s decision in March to bring private care homes within the scope of human rights law, she is sceptical that it will have much impact. So she expects to continue to make skilful use of the media around her court actions, as she did in the Bury case in 2005, when she took children with learning disabilities to the high court in London for a hearing about their services. Bury council subsequently withdrew the proposals that triggered the action.

Many cases fail, but Hossack claims that in the recent past she has saved day services and seven care homes in Staffordshire, won a commitment to build a new home to replace three facing closure in Nottinghamshire, achieved a stay of execution on a care home in Hull, and gained a reprieve for services in Northamptonshire worth £2m a year. She maintains also that it was her move in the European Court of Human Rights, taken at her own cost, that helped prompt the promised law change on private care homes. "But notwithstanding, it would seem that I have brought my profession into disrepute," she observes acidly.

Through the case in Hull, Hossack has had what she describes as "helpful" correspondence with health secretary Alan Johnson, a local MP, on policy on care home closures. "It's not an active government policy as such," she concedes, "but what is the active policy is evicting widows from the care homes and day centres so as to sell the land on which they stand. The way they spin the policy is to make out it?s to make people more independent."

Developing assistive technology, purportedly to help older and disabled people stay in their own homes, is a new way of smoothing closures, she claims. "I have yet to find the assistive technology that can wipe somebody?s arse or get them up in the morning. These are the very real and practical things that people need." Typically provocatively, she adds: "I try to separate out the government's policies from those of [GP serial killer] Harold Shipman, or Robert Mugabe, and I can?t get a fag paper between a lot of them."

Hossack is resigned to ploughing a lone furrow. She says: "Predecessors have stopped doing care home closure work, and I can't say why, but a number have gone on to other things: they sit on House of Lords committees, advise government, local authorities and whatever, win human rights awards.

"I don't know why they went out of the work, but what I do know is that it would take a very brave firm to do what I do and risk its staff. It?s different for me, now there?s really only me and Griggsy."

See the article in its original context
www.guardian.co.uk/society/2008/may/21/interviews.society