Transforming civil legal aid

On this page:

Increasing the number of people we help
How we’re changing civil legal aid
What’s the impact on civil legal aid providers?
A routemap for civil legal aid contracts
For more information

Increasing the number of people we help

We need to modernise how we buy legal aid services. By achieving best value for money and rebalancing the overall budget to provide more funding for civil work, we can continue to increase the numbers of people helped.

We outlined our legal aid reform programme in November 2006.

How we’re changing civil legal aid

We are introducing fixed and graduated fee schemes for civil, family and immigration legal aid. There is no money for an increase in legal aid fee levels. However no money was taken out overall when calculating the fees.

We now have a single unified contract in place for all civil providers, ensuring consistency.

Our strategy for the CLS and the reforms coming out of it are focused on shaping services around clients’ needs. We are introducing Community Legal Advice centres and networks across England and Wales to meet these needs. We aim to have 12-15 of these services in place by spring 2009.

What’s the impact on civil legal aid providers?

An impact assessment for phase one of our reform programme is under Documents (the green box at the top right hand side of this page).

This assessment is based on data that assumes providers will not change their ways of working in light of the reforms. In practice, providers are already changing the way they work.

As a result, we expect the real impacts will be less than shown in the assessment.

For the reforms in place so far, the impact assessment shows overall funding will not change as the fee schemes are designed to be cost neutral. Without the reduction in the criminal budget, the civil budget would have been smaller.

Over half of civil providers would have increased their income if they had been paid the new fees on 2005/06 cases.

London providers are affected most. 57% would have been paid less on 2005/06 cases.

The assessment also considers the impact on particular groups such as those with a disability or people from ethnic minorities.

A route map for civil legal aid contracts

We've published a route map for the development of civil legal aid contracts for the next five years under Documents (the green box at the top right hand side of this page).

Many of the proposals in this paper will be subject to consultation and constructive dialogue with representative bodies and others. However by publishing this timeline and outline principles civil legal aid providers will be able to plan for the future with greater security.

This route map needs to be read in the context of other publications, particularly the:

CLS and Family Strategies
review by Lord Carter of Coles published in July 2006
subsequent consultation and post consultation papers on the implementation of fixed fees.

For more information

Read more about our transformation programme on the About us>Transforming legal aid page.

Visit the other pages in this section for:

our work to improve efficiency in the civil justice system
training and guidance materials.

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Last updated: 23 April 2008