Legal aid statistics quarterly: July to September 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 bulletin 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 July to September 2024 and also provides the latest statement of figures for all earlier periods. This edition also includes figures on Criminal Legal Aid Reform accelerated measures and provider contracts and statistics on criminal legal aid data share. 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: July to September 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 recent quarters.
In the last few quarters, police station claim volumes have increased along with a corresponding increase in representation orders at the magistrates’ court. Expenditure in the police station increased in the quarter again, as expected, following this workload increase. Crown Court workload completions are increasing with more completed trials in court, reflecting impacts of further resourcing in the criminal courts. The temporary reversal of extended sentencing has increased the number of Committals for sentence and appeals from the magistrates’ court and they are now at the same level as before the extended sentencing pilot.
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 also recovered, although not to the same extent, driven by immigration and housing work. Overall, civil legal aid workload is getting back to pre-pandemic levels with upwards trends in housing, domestic violence, mental health and immigration. Figures for early legal advice in housing are included from September onwards in the legal help series of tables.
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 (9), Press Officers (5), Digital Officers (2), Private secretaries (5), Legal Aid Analysis (2)
Legal Aid Agency
Chief Executive, Chief Executive’s Office, Senior Commissioning Manager, Director of Finance Business Partnering, Service Development Managers (2), Exceptional and Complex Cases Workflow Co-ordinator, Change Manager