Will legal aid, as with so many other public services, simply be co-opted into a system of managed decline?

We are facing a significant legal aid crisis in England and Wales, the Law Society says legal aid is ‘in tatters’. In spite of an ongoing consultation into civil legal aid, as well as a proposed boost to legal aid in the criminal field in recent months, the crisis continues. A seeming disconnect between the record profits being announced by UK law firms and the current legal aid situation means that the divide across the legal profession feels more jarring than ever. While our public services are crumbling around us with little prospect of improvement in sight, our rights to social citizenship through access to justice are being ever diminished across the sector by the inadequate legal aid settlement. Fighting for our legal rights underpinned by legal aid has rarely been more important.

What currently keeps the legal aid sector afloat in maintaining its functionality is simply the legal aid lawyers themselves. Despite the poor funding that is so insufficient for the hard working conditions, there is a core persevere to push for access to justice. Findings from our recent project funded by the British Academy on the legal aid sector – the largest and broadest qualitative research of its kind, involving 131 interviews with lawyers working across civil, criminal and social welfare law – prioritises a practitioner narrative, which we believe should take centre stage to help us understand how and why legal aid lawyers can make the scheme work in the face of great challenges. It seems that valuing human connection more than wealth may be the only saving grace for the persistence of legal aid despite everything being thrown against it.

Social justice

Questioning why individuals want to work in the legal aid sector – when we are facing significant access to justice challenges as a society – remains pivotal for its sustainability going forward. Emergent from our research is a clear social justice orientated alignment to the work, one which prioritises fulfilment over money, as in the following quote:

“I think if you compare that job to being a conveyancer or being a city lawyer who never goes into court or never sees a client, you know, I think it’s a very pure form of being a lawyer.”

As evidenced in the excerpt above, the idea that legal aid lawyering is a ‘pure’ form of lawyering rests on the fact that it prioritises human connection and face-to-face interaction. This supposition, and the comparisons with other parts of the legal profession, are of course contestable and not intended as slights. They represent, though, a self-understanding based on lawyering as a relational endeavour. These are features that are more commonly associated with legally aided work, certainly in the minds of those we spoke with.

A number of charitable bodies such as the Access to Justice Foundation and the Public Law Project work tirelessly to improve access to current legal aid schemes. Yet, at the very forefront of legal aid practice are the legal aid lawyers themselves. This is even though legal aid lawyers are often overlooked and undermined in policy and public consciousness. The cuts to legal aid under the Legal Aid, Sentencing and Punishment of Offenders Act 2012 – or LASPO – have had a particularly disproportionate impact on the marginalised in the UK. Legal aid clients often face other vulnerabilities that make engaging in legal processes particularly difficult.  For many, legal aid can be a vital lifeline as it provides an opportunity to contribute to social justice on a case-to-case basis. As such, we were told how “it’s the kind of micro rather than macro” elements that allow for the small, subtle connections and exchanges that are special in legal aid practice. This ‘humanitarian’ appeal was prominent amongst our participants: 

“I’ve always been interested in humanitarian causes and causes that are certainly for people who are at their most vulnerable and desperate, that probably inherently has always been something I’ve been interested in. And then it goes hand-in-hand that those are areas which have a significant amount of legal aid work in them. So, the same would be said of immigration, crime, and family.... And that being things that are interesting and probably they have that humanitarian appeal to them.”

This public-spirited aspect coincides with the idea that doing such work is ‘useful’ to society. This is in contrast with private work, which is considered to be more money oriented. What struck us the most was the sense of pride upheld by the lawyers despite incredibly precarious working conditions: 

“Really proud. Yeah. It’s been a fantastic way to lead a productive working life. It’s been really interesting. You can feel society and politics; you’re in the heart of it. It’s actually there…you get to meet so many different people. There’s so many different stories. That’s a real privilege. It made me think most people are really nice. Because I meet so many people who are living in conditions which are really difficult.”

Employing skills as a legal aid lawyer to ‘actually do something good’ is currently what is keeping the sector’s collective heads above the water. The preference of the legal aid working culture amongst participants provides the glue that the sector needs right now. To this end, contributing to change from the ground up prevails over any form of monetary desire. Yet the question remains, how long can those working at the very heart of justice keep it beating? 

The impact of austerity 

As discussed above, lawyers are often drawn to legal aid in pursuit of social justice and the idea of contributing to the betterment of disadvantaged communities who need legal support. However, the ability of the sector to help its clients has always hinged upon a corresponding political commitment to these social justice objectives. Unfortunately, legal aid is expensive for governments to provide, and demand for publicly funded legal services has always outstripped supply. Administrations from across the political spectrum in England and Wales have undertaken a range of reforms targeted at streamlining the legal aid scheme to save money. Examples include: imposing a fixed fee for specific aspects of legal aid work rather than hourly billing; requiring organisations to bid for government contracts to undertake legal aid work; reducing the fees that can be claimed for particular types of legal aid work; narrowing the eligibility for clients seeking to rely on legal aid; and, most recently, limiting the kinds of work that can be undertaken as part of the legal aid scheme.

Consequently, the number of organisations offering legal aid funded advice and representation has steadily diminished, with many forced to either stop offering legal aid services or to subsidise this work with income from privately paying clients. This gradual tightening culminated in April 2013, which saw the implementation of LASPO. This statute, introduced by the 2010 Conservative–Liberal Democrat coalition government, removed entire areas of law from its scope, creating a default expectation of non-eligibility. Since then, there has been a stark increase in the number of legal aid ‘deserts’ – geographical areas where there are just one or even no legal aid providers – across England and Wales, in prominent fields like housing law. As one housing lawyer explained during their interview, these changes have had a significant impact on the ability to recruit and train the next generation of lawyers specialising in areas like housing:

“When I got my training contract way back in 2000…the Legal Services Commission was open to funding the next generation and was positively engaging with that as a process and was putting money in it. When 2010 came and all the legal aid changes came, I think it was literally the first thing that got cut. And that makes me sad because I very much look behind me and see that there is nobody else coming through.” 

Similar sentiments came from lawyers working in family law, an area which was almost entirely hollowed out by the LASPO eligibility changes. When asked for their view about the biggest challenge currently facing the legal aid sector, one lawyer said:

“[S]ecuring the future of people who will work in legal aid. Because as everything else gets more expensive, and legal aid lags behind…it becomes harder to make it work financially. And so people leave, or don’t stay very long. And then you’re always having to train new people, which takes up the time of people who could be doing the work more.”

To understand this, it is important to appreciate that legal aid reforms, particularly LASPO, were part of a broader policy agenda of harsh austerity measures targeted at limiting public expenditure in an effort to reduce the national deficit, which have had a destructive effect on the UK state (and its population). Other measures have included constraining spending on state welfare schemes, confining funding for local government, and restricting financial support for public services like police, courts, prisons, and education. Of course, the effects of these policies were borne unevenly by different population groups, with those who rely more heavily on state subsidies and interact more frequently with public services bearing the brunt of the harm. In 2025, we also now know that these same populations were most heavily affected by the Covid-19 pandemic, with a loss of economic security, increased rates of family breakdown, health problems, and limited access to face-to-face interventions via public services. When asked about any changes to their client base over the past few decades, one lawyer explained that during their career they had seen their most vulnerable clients bear the brunt of these events:

“[W]hen austerity came, they were like, ‘Oh my god, this is the worst. It can’t get any worse than this.’ And a pandemic comes like, ‘Oh, now it’s worse.’ Then the cost-of-living crisis comes.” 

Each of these factors came up continually throughout the interviews with legal aid lawyers working across all three areas of law. During the interviews, lawyers explained that austerity and cost-of-living pressures have both increased the volume of people that need to rely on legal aid services, as well as the level of vulnerability among those client groups. At the same time, legal aid reforms have deeply impaired both their ability to support a larger and more diverse client base, as well as the financial sustainability of their legal aid practice. In reality, this means that disadvantaged communities are not only contending with a withdrawal of local support services and state subsidies, but are also faced with an even more constrained landscape of legal support through which they might challenge erroneous welfare decisions, unfair eviction notices, or access early interventions to assist with the swift resolution of a family law dispute.

A key finding of our study, therefore, is that the legal aid sector is currently facing an existential crisis prompted by the combined impact of austerity, legal aid reform, and the Covid-19 pandemic. For example, when asked what they thought was the biggest challenging facing the legal aid sector today, one lawyer explained simply: “Funding. Staying alive. Being present. It’s certainly not demand for services, because they’re constant and growing.” Another, when asked about the nature of their criminal legal aid work, stated:

“You’re battling every day to get cases prepared and to get the work done. And it is a struggle. And…it shouldn’t be…that’s really not the definition of justice. You know, somebody’s liberty is at stake. The time and effort should be afforded to their representatives to do the job properly.” 

Given the scale and extent of this crisis, it is reasonable to wonder: what keeps lawyers committed to legal aid and the day-to-day struggle of working in the sector? The answer appears to lie in social justice motivations:

“I think you’ve got to want to do it. Which I think is the recruitment crisis really. Because you’ve got a lot of people that will show that initial interest, but staying long term, it takes a certain character.” 

While many lawyers were proud to work in legal aid and were strongly committed to these social justice goals, there was a widespread acceptance that these motivations alone are not always enough to sustain the legal aid sector long term, given the impacts of austerity, legal aid reform, and the Covid-19 pandemic: 

“There will always be more demand than there is supply of legal aid lawyers. There’ll always be fewer people going into legal aid than we need. There are always going to be more people retiring. The sector remains unsustainable in its current funded form. And meanwhile we somehow have to not only recover our productivity and performance that we had before the pandemic, but we have to do better than that.”

The future

There is a real feeling of determination in the sector. To persist against the odds. At times, sure there was a sense of weary resignation in regard to carrying on, but this was always underpinned with a righteous belief in the importance of the sector, meaning they needed to endure. We would often hear blackly comic responses about how they would stick around because they had to, no matter how grim that prospect might be:

“I suspect we’ll still be here. Still struggling, still kind of moaning and kind of agitating, I hope. Because…I believe that this work needs to continue in some shape or form.”

These lawyers were being asked to look to the future at a time when, a decade after LASPO, the National Audit Office reported that there had been a real-term reduction in legal aid spending from £2,584 million a year in 2012/13 to £1,856 million in 2022/23. This was a reduction of £728 million. Sticking around would rely on their dogged commitment to the cause, and those working in the sector realise how key their intense belief in their work was to their staying despite the difficulties they faced:

“I think there’s still enough passion and motivation…within the sector for people to want to continue…. We’ve had a tough ten years, twelve years. But we have learned to adapt and to change. And we’ve been able to ride other storms so far…. I’d hope we are around for the next ten, twenty years. But it’s very hard to look beyond the next few years and beyond the passion, the will, the determination of the people within the sector. That’s the thing I’m sort of relying on to make it continue. And that’s probably the biggest, the biggest resource the sector has.”

The endurance of the sector relies so much on the will of those within it. There was a widespread belief that those running the country need to recognise the importance of better funding the sector, as we were told that “the government will just have to…put money in to it.” However, many recognised that this wasn’t likely: “neither is it a sector that is likely to get significant investment because it’s not very popular.”

However, before leaving office, the last government announced they were undertaking a review of civil legal aid. The review would consider the civil legal aid system in its entirety, from how services are procured, how well the current system works for users and providers, and how civil legal aid impacts the wider justice system. But we know the problems, as shown in the Legal Aid Census, chiefly that civil legal aid fees have not increased in 30 years, and indeed have been cut during this time. Year on year legal aid lawyers are expected to deliver their expert services to vulnerable clients based on fees that continuously fall due to inflation. Many have simply given up. Those who remain are exhausted, cannot recruit new staff, and struggle to retain their existing staff.

There was hope that those in charge of funding might come to better understand the value of legal aid (and how investment in early advice services could actually save money):

“Just imagining a situation in which government suddenly realised that legal aid actually does save money in the long run, you know, it saves money for the health service. And it enables children to get a good education…. So, if they realise the benefits of legal work in that sense, and just supposing that happened and an enlightened government funded legal services. Maybe not on the present model. Maybe on a different model.”

In light of the struggles of private practice in this landscape of chronic underfunding, some of the lawyers we interviewed looked towards alternative models such as salaried lawyers:

“I’m looking towards some form of national legal service…. I think you need a salaried service of some kind. Which is able to deal with a certain amount of casework. And which is able to support other people in doing casework.”

In the spirit of taking a new approach, Roger Smith, a member of the International Legal Aid Group, and Nic Madge, a Barrister, published ‘The National Legal Service - a New Vision for Access to Civil Justice’ in an attempt to influence policy ahead of the 2024 general election. Much of this model for a new national legal service was founded on the public support for the NHS. This would manage and coordinate a national service providing access to justice that would commonly badge all those providing services as part of the national legal service, whether or not they are directly funded by the service. It was also informed by attributes of the mixed model of publicly funded legal assistance services delivered in Australia and Canada, and as is being explored in Scotland. They sought to bring private practitioners, salaried lawyers, Law Centres, national charities, and advice agencies together through a devolved approach, organised on a regional basis. 

There was no such bold thinking on legal aid from the main parties contesting the election though and the manifestos were much more muted. Both Conservatives and Labour offered a brief mention of legal aid, though couched in a wider discussion on victims, with no recognition or commitment to address the wider structural issues of the legal aid sector. The lack of commitment to support the ailing legal aid sector was unsurprising considering that it was an election in which the vision of the two leading candidates for Prime Minister was said to be largely similar – both rooted in the same ‘ruined economic and political model…of greater austerity’. Though the eventual new Prime Minister Keir Starmer explicitly denied Labour would return the country to austerity, he also refused to rule out cutting public services, meaning his party’s approach tacitly accepted already existing spending plans that involved cuts – meaning austerity was ‘baked in’.  The Institute for Government suggested that Labour, like the Conservatives, ducked the important questions on funding public services in their manifesto, making cuts inevitable but unarticulated. Having assessed both manifestos, the Institute for Fiscal Studies claimed the parties were both partaking in a ‘conspiracy of silence’ on the cuts they would both need to embark on due to the minimal attempts to raise taxes to support the growth of the state.

In their first budget, the new Labour government sought raise up to £40 billion of taxes with a pledge to reverse the decline in UK public services. This was not enough according to the Institute for Fiscal Studies, for whom ‘an extra £9 billion of tax rises would be needed to avoid a fresh austerity drive in key public services.’ There was no mention of legal aid in the budget, though there have been developments since. An extra £3 million was added to fees for police station and youth court work, on top of the £21 million committed by the previous government to criminal work. However, the increase fell short of even the minimum advised by the Bellamy Review, over which the previous government had already been defeated at court for failing to properly implement its recommendations. There was also a 10% increase announced to immigration and housing fees – the first rise in regard to civil legal aid fees in three decades, following the review of civil legal aid commissioned by the last government. However, the immigration increase was framed as clearing the asylum backlog against a dog-whistle racist speech from Starmer complaining about an “open borders experiment” from the Conservatives rather than promoting access to justice. Firms working in the sector raised fears that the increases were too slight to make up for years of neglect. As one leading practitioner suggested, the move “doesn’t even touch the sides in terms of the changes needed.”

In this context, the question remains, whether this Labour government will continue the deterioration of legal aid or whether there might be change – change, more broadly, was the tagline of Labour’s election campaign. And Starmer promised to “change Britain for the better.” However, whether change in policy, rather than just party, will come is unclear in terms of legal aid, as elsewhere. Will legal aid, as with so many other public services, simply be co-opted into a system of managed decline?

Daniel Newman is Professor in Law at Cardiff University. His research focuses on access to justice across the civil and criminal justice systems, and he has written extensively on legal aid. He has published five books and four edited collections, as well as more than thirty-five articles in peer-reviewed journals. He has worked on research with a range of government, charity, and advice sector organisations. He edits the Common Law World Review journal and is on the editorial board of the Journal of Law and Society. He edits the Bristol University Press book series, Perspectives on Law and Access to Justice.

Emma Cooke is a Lecturer in Criminology at the University of Kent. Her research interests are inter-disciplinary spanning criminal justice, socio-legal, and occupational sociology remits. Her recent research has focused specifically on the cuts to legal aid across all practice areas, offering a holistic insight into the working world of the lawyers themselves. She has published a number of articles and her first book is out for publication in May 2025, entitled the ‘Hidden World of the Legal Aid Lawyer,’ with Bristol University Press. 

Jess Mant is a Senior Research Fellow at Monash University. In her research, she focuses on issues of access to justice, family law, legal aid, and self-representation in court processes. She has undertaken a range of empirical research projects that contribute to the evidence base in England and Wales and Australia about the lived experiences of legal professionals, judges, the voluntary advice sector, and self-represented litigants. She has published a wide range of articles and books on these topics which have influenced professional practice, as well as law and policy reform.