Source · Select Committees · Public Accounts Committee
Recommendation 22
22
Accepted
Legal aid sustainability remains a concern with fee increases pending ministerial decision
Recommendation
We asked MoJ and LAA for an update on how they were monitoring the sustainability and profitability of legal aid work. MoJ said that it had recently surveyed both criminal and civil legal aid providers and that it was currently considering recommendations made by the CLAAB. It also stated that fees across the rest of civil legal aid remain under review. However, it 38 Qq 44-53, 67-68 39 HC Committee of Public Accounts, Value for money from legal aid, Thirty-Third Report of Session 2023-24, HC 481, 24 May 2024. 40 HMT, Treasury Minutes, 5 September 2024 41 Letter from the Ministry of Justice, 6 November 2025 14 stressed that any changes to fees are ultimately a decision for Ministers.42 LAA acknowledged that the sustainability of legal aid remains a concern and that while setting fees is outside of its domain, there are several things it was doing to help address this. This includes looking at what it can do to reduce the administrative burden on providers, extending contract terms to give providers more certainty, and making contract processes more flexible to enable firms to join the market more regularly, which was previously only possible every five years.43
Government Response Summary
The department will explore options to routinely monitor the profitability of legal aid firms, improve the management information collected on demand with the support of Ipsos, and provide an update in October 2026.
Government Response
Accepted
HM Government
Accepted
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.