Legal aid statistics quarterly: October to December 2023
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 October to December 2023 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: October to December 2023 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 civil legal aid has increased year on year and has also increased more over the recent quarters. Criminal legal aid expenditure in the most recent quarter is compared to a period covering the impact of industrial action last year in the Crown Court, which in turn reduced workload completed and the associated expenditure, which means that some of the large increases are not indicative of underlying trends in the system.
In the last few quarters, we have seen increases in police station claims and a corresponding increase 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 types of claim with trials increasing showing impacts of increased resourcing in the criminal courts.
Overall civil expenditure is increasing which is driven by increases in family law expenditure with the number of claims being paid outside of the fixed fee scheme increasing 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 still remains below pre-pandemic levels although trends are increasing in domestic violence, immigration and mental health.
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 (6), 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