Legal aid statistics quarterly: January to March 2024
Activity in the legal aid system for England and Wales, including criminal and civil legal aid, family mediation, providers of legal aid, client characteristics and Central Funds payments.
Applies to England and Wales
Documents
Details
Legal aid statistics publication presents statistics on the legal aid scheme administered by the Legal Aid Agency (LAA) for England and Wales. This edition comprises the first release of statistics for the three month period from January to March 2024 and also provides the latest statement of figures for all earlier periods. This edition also includes figures on central funds, providers of legal aid, inquests and the diversity of clients receiving legal aid, Criminal Legal Aid Reform accelerated measures and provider contracts. These statistics are derived from data held by LAA, produced and published by Legal Aid Statistics team of the Ministry of Justice (MOJ).
Data files the source for the key statistics on activity in the legal aid system for England and Wales in .csv (Comma delimited) format are published on Legal aid statistics: January to March 2024 data files.
Link to Data visualisation tools, a web-based tools allowing the user to view and analyse charts and tables based on the published statistics.
Statistician’s Comment
This publication shows that expenditure across both criminal and civil legal aid has increased year on year and has also increased over the recent quarters.
In the last few quarters, police station claims have increased along with a corresponding uptick in representation orders at the magistrates’ court. Expenditure in the police station increased in the quarter again, as expected, due to higher fees for police station advice that were introduced at the end of 2022. Crown Court workload completions are showing a return to more serious criminal cases with more trials in court increasing showing impacts of more resourcing in the criminal courts. Overall, yearly expenditure in the litigator and advocate graduated fee schemes has reached their highest values since they were introduced. This follows increased sitting days at the Crown Court to reduce the outstanding case backlog.
Overall civil expenditure is increasing driven by a rise in family law expenditure with the number of claims being paid outside of the fixed fee scheme growing due to more time being taken during the court process. Other non-family workload has not recovered to the same extent, and this is driven by a slow recovery of housing work although, again, in the last quarter this has increased. Overall, civil legal aid workload remains below pre-pandemic levels despite upwards trends in domestic violence, mental health and immigration. Within immigration this is driven by increases in court resource to reduce the queue of claims waiting.
Within this annual release, covering both diversity and legal aid provider information, there have been no changes across the schemes in the proportions of legal aid work by sex, disability status, ethnicity and age band of the client. Overall, the number of providers, both providing and contracted to deliver legal aid services, has fallen in recent years. There have been falls in both legal aid areas starting work but the past year has also seen a rise in the number of civil legal aid providers completing work.
Figures are included covering the recently introduced Housing Loss Prevention Advice Service and breakdowns of these numbers are available in the underlying data accompanying this report
Pre-release
Pre-release access of up to 24 hours is granted to the following persons:
Ministry of Justice
Secretary of State for Justice, Parliamentary Under Secretary of State, Permanent Secretary, Head of Legal Aid Policy (2), Special Advisor Inbox, Legal Aid Policy Officials (5), Press Officers (5), Digital Officers (2), Private secretaries (5), Legal Aid Analysis (2)
Legal Aid Agency
Chief Executive, Chief Executive’s Office, Head of Financial Forecasting, Senior Commissioning Manager, Director of Finance Business Partnering, Service Development Managers (2), Exceptional and Complex Cases Workflow Co-ordinator, Change Manager