Source · Select Committees · Public Accounts Committee
Recommendation 20
20
Deferred
Previous committee highlighted MoJ's slow progress reviewing legal aid system sustainability
Recommendation
Our predecessor Committee’s 2024 report on legal aid stated that MoJ had been slow to initiate and complete its large-scale reviews of the sustainability of both the criminal and civil legal aid systems. It raised particular concerns around the civil legal aid sector where legal aid fees had not increased since 1996. The Committee recommended that MoJ needed to improve its ability to respond to emerging sustainability issues in a timely manner and that it should put mechanisms in place to regularly review the profitability of legal aid work.39
Government Response Summary
The department will explore options to routinely monitor the profitability of legal aid firms, improve management information collected on demand, streamline processes and reduce administrative burdens, and will provide an update to the Committee on this work in October 2026.
Government Response
Deferred
HM Government
Deferred
5.1 The government agrees with the Committee’s recommendation. Target implementation date: October 2026 5.2 The department recognises that understanding the sustainability of the market and taking steps to support it is important to maintain effective access to justice for clients. 5.3 The department’s current focus in this regard is to improve understanding of demand for legal aid services and the sector’s capacity to meet that demand. This provides direct insight into market sustainability. Part of building this understanding is the department’s work, with support from Ipsos, to explore the feasibility of establishing a repeatable methodology that will help us monitor sustainability by improving the management information collected on demand. This information will feed directly into the legal aid digital transformation programme, which aims to support sustainability by ensuring new digital systems streamline processes and reduce administrative burdens. 5.4 The department will also explore options to routinely monitor the profitability of legal aid firms and interrogate the extent to which this impacts supply and influences market sustainability, alongside considering other factors. The department emphasizes to the Committee the importance of these other factors because future sustainability is shaped not only by fee levels, but also by the experience of providers and clients, the complexity of the system, and associated administrative burdens. Driving improvement in these areas is a core aim of the transformation programme referenced above. 5.5 MoJ will provide an update to the Committee on this work in October 2026. Any future policy decisions based on this will be in the context of the department’s spending review settlement.