Legal aid 'helped me keep my son'

Legal aid helped Tracey keep custody of her baby son

The Law Society has warned that vulnerable people struggle to get legal aid and planned reforms will make this worse.

Tracey, a former heroin addict, tells how the current system helped her put her life on track and stop her son being taken into care.

Everything seemed to be going fine all the way through the pregnancy. I kept social services and everyone informed but no-one said they would take him off me or anything,

And then I changed my solicitors, last minute, and I got told about a week before they were taking him off me.

There are people out there like me, willing to change, but just need that extra help Tracey Vulnerable 'denied legal aid'

They said 'we're taking him off you because there's nothing else we can do, we can put him in foster care because we haven't decided what we are going to do.'

Well I ended up in labour that same weekend and I met Jenny Beck [her solicitor] from TV Edwards the next morning.

She visited me in hospital and I told her the situation, and already she was informed by the social worker what was going on.

And she pushed really hard to get me a placement in a residential - which is a place where the mother goes with the child and they can watch you on a day-to-day basis.

Tested for drugs

The other option was that they were going to put him into foster care.

The funding [was important] - if she didn't make all those phonecalls to get the placement and if she wasn't rallying around to do the things then it may never have happened, I might have lost him.

And who knows what road I would have gone down, especially knowing I have been down the drugs situation before.

They had to pay for the drugs tests as well - to prove that I was clean, to prove to the social workers.

It [the system] should definitely stay as it is to give other mothers the chance that I had.

Because everyone just thinks 'oh yeah, once a drug user always a drug user', but there are people out there like me willing to change but just need that extra help.

If you get the help of solicitors backing you - and they have the funding to do it - then that's good and that's going to help other people come through and be kept with their children like me.