Lack of legal aid is leaving people without good quality legal advice and representation
A new report published by Migrants Organise last week, Threadbare: The Quality of Immigration Legal Aid, sheds light on the growing difficulties faced by people navigating the UK's immigration and asylum systems due to a decline in the quality of publicly funded legal advice.
You can download the 42-page report here.
The report was authored by Frances Timberlake, Access to Justice Organiser at Migrants Organise. Research for the report was a conducted collaboratively with Haringey Migrant Support Centre, Migrants Organise, the No Accommodation Network (NACCOM), Refugee Action, and South London Refugee Association. Between April and September 2024, they interviewed 46 people from 20 organisations, including legal aid representatives, immigration advisers, charity workers, and individuals who had used legal aid themselves.
While the shrinking number and capacity of immigration legal aid providers is already well known and well documented, the report goes further to examine how that decline, along with legal and policy changes, has affected the quality of support available to individuals.
Drawing on interviews and case studies, the report explores how both users and providers of legal aid define "good-quality" advice—and reveals how rare that experience has become. Immigration and asylum consistently receive some of the poorest peer review ratings across all areas of law. The report says the lack of high-quality legal aid has shifted an enormous burden onto the wider non-profit advice sector.
Migrants Organise emphasises, however: "The aim is not to identify or undermine legal aid providers who, for reasons often relating to the chronic under-funding of legal aid, difficulties in staff retention, and the hostility of Home Office decision-making, may be unable to provide the quality of representation they would otherwise wish to. Rather, we intend this to be a constructive report looking at the structural causes of the observed decline in legal aid quality, and what is needed to reverse this."
As the report highlights, the deterioration has occurred against the backdrop of increasingly hostile immigration policies, which have raised the stakes for those affected and made access to expert legal advice more urgent. Yet without additional funding, delivering that level of support has become harder than ever.
Poor communication by legal representatives emerged as one of the most frequently raised concerns in the report. A striking 86% of interviewees said that a lack of contact or inadequate communication from legal representatives had been a problem—either for themselves or for the people they supported. Respondents also highlighted a lack of 'ownership' in the legal process. As one immigration adviser put it, this means ensuring clients feel respected and involved throughout their case, so that "the legal procedure feels like it's happening with them, not to them."
Migrants Organise added: "Very few people we spoke to who had accessed legal aid felt that they had a mutually trusting relationship with their legal representative. Respondents also noted that this was made harder when the representative was far away and in-person meetings were not offered or not possible."
Many participants expressed confusion about the various regulatory bodies and the differing standards they impose. Several legal aid providers admitted they were unclear on how the standards aligned—or conflicted—with one another. Meanwhile, individuals who had used legal aid services were often unaware of how the system was regulated or what steps they could take if they had concerns about the quality of representation they received.
The report takes an in-depth look at the causes of poor-quality legal aid work, highlighting low pay, struggles to recruit and retain workers, low capacity and a lack of choice of provider, as well as the role of regulators, such as the Solicitors Regulation Authority and the Legal Aid Agency, and the shifts in wider Government policy.
Migrants Organise commented in concluding: "It is evident from the experiences shared with us in this report that the primary objective of the legal aid system – to assist individuals without the financial means to navigate their legal problems – is failing. The marked difficulty in accessing 'good-quality' legal aid provision in immigration is concerning, and comes as a result both of 'good-quality' providers being forced to leave the sector and 'poor-quality' providers being able to remain in business by making (slim) profit from poor work. Both of these trends, noted by those who were interviewed for this report, can be linked back to underlying issues in the government's management of the legal aid and immigration systems. This includes migrants' increasing need for legal aid services as the UK's immigration regime has become more hostile and complex to navigate, the chronic under-funding of legal aid resulting in lawyers having less time to do the work required, and the adversarial, combative approach to administering legal aid. It is clear that broad and immediate change is needed to ensure that those who have migrated to the UK – and indeed anyone needing legal assistance – have full access to justice now and into the future."
The report offers several recommendations to reverse the current trends. It calls on the Ministry of Justice to overhaul the legal aid system so providers are properly paid and incentivised to deliver high-quality services. In the short term, it urges a significant increase in funding to make client- and staff-focused legal work sustainable. The Home Office is also encouraged to simplify immigration procedures so individuals can better navigate the system without prolonged reliance on legal aid.
Francis Timberlake said: "At Migrants Organise we see everyday how vulnerable people are forced into poverty and trauma through a combination of a cruel immigration system and absence of legal support. In this hostile climate, having legal advice is vital to rebuilding a life here, instead people are facing homelessness, destitution and even deportation. This year alone we have made 438 referrals to legal aid services, but only 9 have been accepted. It doesn't have to be this way- the government needs to go further and listen deeply to the accounts of people who have been left behind, without access to legal advice. Our communities will be better for it."