Lawyer victimised for saving 80 care homes tells how she was ready to lose everything to win dignity for the elderly

‘Lily forgot how to swallow. She withdrew into silence and died within three months,’ says Yvonne. Clarrie was dead within eight weeks. Yet another resident spent her final three months of life in a tumult of aggression induced by the disruption of the move.

But the campaign had been salutary. Yvonne knew, from then on, her life would be irretrievably bound up with the wellbeing of people like Clarrie, Lily and Evelyn.

She began to work with local authorities, advising them on how to move the elderly  -  if such upheavals were absolutely necessary  -  with consideration and safety.

In 2002 she set up her own solicitor’s practice at her home. Her job was to represent those needing care; the vulnerable elderly, the mentally ill; the physically disabled.

But as swiftly as she grew to be a champion of the oppressed, she was also accruing powerful adversaries. Among local authorities, Government Ministers, care providers and even sections of her own profession, she was viewed as a meddlesome enemy.

‘I was hated,’ she says simply. But what propelled her was a profound sense of Christian compassion.

‘You can’t be a decent human being and, knowing you have the skills to do something, refuse to use them to help people.

‘I’ve never felt I could put my career, or my fears that I would be discredited or even bankrupted, before helping those who are unable to help themselves,’ she says.

Despite her failures, she was buoyed by many successes. She has, she says, saved 80 care homes from closure. But the cost to her  -  physically, emotionally and financially  -  has been crippling.

Her business has always incurred heavy financial losses because she takes on many more cases than she had legal aid to finance.

However, her perilous economic position became catastrophic when, in 2004, the Legal Services Commission disputed her spending and claimed back £33,000 from her.

She believes it was no coincidence that this happened a day after she had taken a disabled client to Downing Street to lobby the Prime Minister.

She was forced to make several staff in her practice redundant, ransacking every penny of her savings to pay them. A year later, her legal aid franchise was suspended for 18 months.

Faced with abandoning her clients or working for nothing, she chose the latter course.
‘I’d been a thorn in the side of the Establishment for a number of years,’ she says. ‘I was given a choice: to cease the work I was doing and keep my business, or continue and face bankruptcy.

‘My overdraft was at its limit, we’d remortgaged the house and the stress on my marriage was terrific. David and I became courteous strangers and eventually we separated,’ she says. Although her legal aid contract was reinstated, and she just avoided bankruptcy, she continues to take on hundreds more cases each year than she has Government aid to finance.

She no longer owns a car and, at her lowest ebb, she was too strapped for cash even to buy groceries. A client on income support sent her a food parcel; another pensioner pressed £60 into her hand after looking in her fridge and finding it bare.

Such heart-warming gestures have sustained her. She is in equal measure heroic and bloody-minded. She says that not one of the people she has helped  -  she estimates that they number 15,000  -  has ever lodged a complaint against her.

On the contrary, they regard her as a saint. Eugene Hyde, 76, from Stone in Staffordshire told the tribunal he had tried to kill himself when his home faced closure.

‘To lose Yvonne as a solicitor would be a grave loss and injustice to the elderly. There would be nobody to fight for those who cannot fight for themselves.’

Mercifully it has not come to that. Yvonne, vindicated, indomitable and utterly selfless in her devotion to the oppressed, will continue to fight for Mr Hyde and for thousands like him.