
Frontier Economics has produced a series of reports for the Law Society assessing the sustainability of civil legal funding in England and Wales.
Our latest and final report on this topic sets out the potential benefits for the public sector of increasing civil legal aid funding, and recommends that an immediate increase in civil legal aid rates is required to begin to address the shortfalls in legal aid funding.
A review of existing evidence carried out by Frontier Economics for our final report suggests that, with appropriate levels of funding, civil legal aid provision could relieve pressure on the court system and other public services. For example:Â
- Costs for the wider justice system could be reduced by increasing the availability of civil legal aid
- More housing legal aid could reduce NHS costs, for example by allowing for patients to be discharged quicker and bottlenecks in the healthcare system to be reduced
- Economic productivity could be improved by increasing the provision and accessibility of legal aid
As part of our previous report, we collected detailed financial information from almost 50 organisations to assess the revenues, costs and profitability that can be expected from the delivery of civil legal aid (with a focus on housing and family legal aid). This is the first time an exercise of this nature has been carried out for the legal aid sector. Our research highlighted that civil legal aid work is loss-making for the majority of providers that we engaged with. This detailed analysis of legal aid providers’ finances suggests action is needed now to prevent further reductions in the provision
Please click here to read our report Implications of research on the sustainability of civil legal aid