Former Garden Court barrister finds 57% of asylum applicants in England and Wales are now unable to secure legal aid representation
A notable new post on the Immigration Law Practitioners' Association (ILPA) blog last week sees Dr Jo Wilding of the University of Sussex continuing to chronicle the serious shortage of legal aid providers for immigration and asylum cases across the UK.
Image credit: UK GovernmentYou can read the full blog post on the ILPA website here.
Jo Wilding has written extensively about the deficit in immigration and asylum legal advice and legal aid providers across the UK. Her published work includes the hugely comprehensive No access to justice: how legal advice deserts fail refugees, migrants and our communities, authored in 2022 for Refugee Action.
Wilding assesses the shortfall in legal aid by comparing the available supply to the existing demand. Her most recent data reveals that in 2023/24, this gap has reached an unprecedented 57% in England and Wales. Consequently, 57% of primary applicants seeking asylum or appealing a refusal in the First-tier Tribunal (Immigration and Asylum Chamber) are now unable to secure legal aid representation. In real terms, this means that at least 54,555 people are left without a legal aid representative.
To make matters worse, the introduction of new legal aid contracts in September 2024 led to a drop in the total number of immigration and asylum offices, decreasing from 226 in August 2024 to 222 in October 2024. Although 50 new provider offices were awarded contracts, this gain was outweighed by the closure or exit of 54 offices from the legal aid sector.
Dr Wilding noted: "There is a lot of churn as potentially more experienced firms are replaced by inexperienced ones, many of whom intend to start small or indeed to remain small. I've talked to several of the new contract holders from the 2023 and 2024 rounds and, aside from recruitment difficulties, several of them are small one or two person organisations who wanted contracts to be able to take on low volumes of cases of very specific types. Others are support organisations which took on contracts in desperation after being unable to refer their clients to legal aid lawyers."
Additionally, Wilding raises concerns about the true capacity of some newly opened legal aid offices, including firms operating out of hourly or daily rental spaces and those with only a skeletal staff presence. She warns that this approach resembles past instances where firms held contracts for temporary offices that opened few, if any, cases before closing. Even more troubling is the possibility that these firms might actually attempt to manage thousands of cases with insufficient staff.
As a solution to the myriad of problems with immigration and asylum legal aid, Jo Wilding calls for the urgent 'demarketising' of the sector.
She explains: "The simple and cost-effective solution to this is to demarketise the sector: abandon the contract tenders and replace them with a registration scheme allowing any organisation which meets the criteria to register when ready to begin doing legal aid work. The Legal Aid Agency (or other body) would still retain control via the quality standards to join the register, and it would save the vast energy and resource that goes into organisations' bids and the LAA's processing of those bids."