Public Law Project says need for evidence to demonstrate full costs of LASPO Act is "embarrassingly urgent"
A report published last week by the Public Law Project (PLP) says evidence is lacking to show that cuts to legal aid made by the Legal Aid, Sentencing and Punishment of Offenders Act of 2012 (LASPO) delivered value for money.
The 20-page report can be downloaded here. If focuses on legal aid for immigration cases.
The report was jointly authored by Dr. Emma Marshall, Dr. Samuel Engle and Siân Pearce from the University of Exeter in partnership with PLP, Migrants Organise, Dr. Jo Wilding of the University of Sussex, and Dr. Daniel Newman of Cardiff University.
Drawing on existing evidence from sources including the National Audit Office and the Public Accounts Committee about the costs and benefits of LASPO, the report calls for improved data collection and it sets out what data should be collected.
It explains: "This report argues that to deliver better value for money, there must be significant improvements to the systematic collection and analysis of quantitative data across government. Without such information, it is impossible to know whether better value for money has in fact been delivered. In doing so, we join existing calls for data-driven approaches to access to justice policy. Better data would not only enable a better understanding of the impact of changes to immigration legal aid under LASPO, which is the focus of this report, but would also improve our understanding of the wider impact of changes to the scope of civil legal aid. Although this report focuses on the economic impacts of LASPO, we acknowledge the wide body of literature that speaks to the human cost of building immigration legal aid policy on a poor evidence base, including, for example, the detrimental impacts of protracted periods of waiting on mental health."
Among the report's findings is that the Government has wasted nearly £400,000 a year assessing immigration legal aid applications that fall under Exceptional Case Funding (ECF). Nearly 90% of ECF applications are approved.
The report states: "Based on 2,265 immigration ECF applications in 2022/23 at an average cost of £203 per application, the overall cost of processing immigration ECF applications is approximately £459,795. If these applications were processed as standard applications, the total cost would be £77,010. Assuming that most immigration legal aid applications would be processed as standard applications, the saving of bringing immigration legal aid back into scope could be approximately £382,785 in Legal Aid Agency processing costs."
Jo Hynes of PLP said the need for evidence to demonstrate the full costs of LASPO is "embarrassingly urgent".