Thank you, Chairperson, and thank you to the hon Shiceka for this question.
Improving service delivery across the board is something that government continuously strives for, including those services afforded to it by the Legal Aid Board. The Minister has continued to engage with the department and related bodies such as the board and the National Prosecuting Authority in this regard. These engagements obviously also touched on matters such as access to sufficient services and complaints on or perceived lack and/or low standards of service delivery in some areas.
I wish to inform hon members that considerable progress has been made by the board in terms of service delivery and the way in which it is perceived and markets itself.
The following are interventions and monitoring tools introduced by the board to improve service delivery: firstly, a client-focused programme which comprises complaint registers, suggestion boxes and an ethics hotline managed by an independent company. Secondly, senior legal aid legal practitioners do random court observations on actual court work. This assists supervisors in reviewing the quality of work of practitioners.
Thirdly, once a year the Legal Aid Board contracts an external legal practitioner to make an assessment of the quality of work done by its in- house lawyers and the results thereof are assisting the Legal Aid Board in improving their monitoring systems.
Fourthly, legal aid justice centre executives periodically interact with Justice cluster stakeholders, including judges, magistrates and prosecutors to engage on matters of common interest, as well as to get feedback on the performance of the lawyers under the Legal Aid Board.
Lastly, awaiting-trial prisoners are visited once every two months through the Legal Aid Board prison-linked project. The visits are meant to reaffirm the mandate of the Legal Aid Board to assist awaiting-trial prisoners so that they can take an informed position on deciding who is to represent them in a matter.
In conclusion, we also want to congratulate and commend the board for its unqualified audit report it has received once again.
So, what is important here is that there can be no doubt in a big organisation such as the Legal Aid Board. It has a budget of R500 million with 56 legal aid centres and a lot of work being done by lawyers, so clearly there's going to be a difference in the level of work that is performed.
It has to be through training and monitoring systems that we better that, and also, particularly, that members of this House, when they do their oversight work, tell us where there're weaknesses in the system because I do not accept the criticism that all lawyers of the Legal Aid Board are bad. Of course that's nonsense. You get good ones and then you also get some bad ones.
I also think we must be careful of this criticism because, clearly, a legal aid system - if you go and study any legal aid system anywhere in the world, I don't care if it's in the richest country you can find - per se is geared to give legal representation but not legal representation at a senior counsel level.
I mean, there is no system in the world that does that. Clearly, legal aid practitioners are, in some instances, relatively junior. In some instances they are, of course, more experienced but the important thing is that we must monitor it.
Please, members, bring to our attention where you find weaknesses, for example we've been told that Mafikeng's legal aid centre is particularly weak and is having problems, and so on. So we'll go and investigate and talk with the Legal Aid Board to have a look at that. So we'll try and keep on making the work that they provide more professional and, of course, better than it is now. So please, we do request information wherever you find that.