Legal Aid Scheme
The question
To ask the Secretary of State for Justice, how many matter starts there have been for (a) legal help public law level one, (b) family help public law lower level two, (c) legal help private law level one and (d) family help private law lower level two in the last five years for which data is available.
Answered by Sarah Sackman
The requested information can be found in the below tables:
Public Family Law
Financial Year | Fee Level 1 | Fee Level 2 |
2020-21 | 1,542 | 12,371 |
2021-22 | 1,351 | 13,325 |
2022-23 | 1,110 | 13,363 |
2023-24 | 1,238 | 14,638 |
2024-25 | 1,266 | 15,623 |
Private Family Law
Financial Year | Level 1 | Level 1 and 2 | Level 2 |
2020-21 | 5,056 | 655 | 42 |
2021-22 | 5,541 | 875 | 40 |
2022-23 | 5,151 | 776 | 30 |
2023-24 | 5,425 | 910 | 55 |
2024-25 | 5,596 | 1,003 | 92 |
Data is derived from the Legal Aid Agency’s (LAA) Official Statistics, which can be found at: Legal aid statistics data files - GOV.UK. The LAA also publishes a more user-friendly tool to analyse this data which can be accessed here.
Please note that as Public Law and Private Law Family cases are delivered as Controlled Work, legal aid providers are permitted to self-grant legal aid under delegated functions. This means there is no application to the LAA. Data is therefore derived from claim submissions sent to the LAA at the end of the case. It is possible therefore that a small number of cases reported in the table above were opened in the previous financial year.
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