Next steps for family fees

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Consultation response published

We published our consultation response to Family Legal Aid funding from 2010 on 21 Oct 2009. This sets out how we'll be changing the way we pay for family work from Oct 2010.

About the new schemes

The family legal aid funding reforms are designed to protect services for children and families and to ensure the future sustainability of legal aid in light of increasing costs.

The consultation focused on two payment schemes:

The Private Family Law Representation Scheme, which will bring private family work (excluding advocacy) within a standard fee regime;
The Family Advocacy Scheme, which creates a single graduated fee scheme covering payments to both solicitor advocates and barristers for public and private family law cases.

The consultation also dealt with the payment of some disbursements, including payments to Independent Social Workers.

The new schemes will be implemented from October 2010.

Background to the schemes

Since 2002, expenditure on family legal aid has grown from £399m in 2001/2 to £582m in 07/08, a real terms increase of 24%. Expenditure on family barristers under the Family Graduated Fee Scheme have risen by 28% between 2003/04 and 2007/08. These costs now represent approximately 10% of the overall civil budget.

Currently, solicitor advocates and in-house barrister advocates are paid hourly rates while self-employed barristers are paid through a separate graduated fee scheme. The new schemes are designed to ensure that all professionals involved in family cases are paid equally for carrying out the same work ensuring future cost control and that access to legal aid for vulnerable people is maintained.

Consultation process

The consultation was published on 17 December 2008 and closed, after an extension to the period of consultation, on 3 April 2009. A total of 1,491 responses were received, all of which have been carefully considered when forming the final schemes. As part of the consultation process we also ran a series of 47 provider workshops across England and Wales attended by over 1200 solicitors and barristers.

Following the analysis of consultation responses, the LSC invited practitioner representatives from each of the representative bodies to join a working group to advise in more detail how the proposed scheme should be developed in order to better reflect complexity and to address the issues of preparation for employed advocates.

As a result of the responses to the consultation and meetings with representative bodies the schemes have been revised. The Family Advocacy Scheme now recognises cases that may be particularly complex by paying on the basis of time at court and allowing uplifts for particular factors in the case.

For more information

Read the full consultation response on the CLS Consultation Pages.

Two Q&A documents accompany the response and will be updated on a regular basis.

Questions can be submitted to: family@legalservices.gov.uk

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Last updated: 18 November 2009