Justice Committee
Oral evidence: Access to Justice, HC 189
Tuesday 9 June 2026
Ordered by the House of Commons to be published on 9 June 2026.
Members present: Andy Slaughter (Chair); Pam Cox; Sir Ashley Fox; Warinder Juss; Tessa Munt; Sarah Russell; Dr Neil Shastri-Hurst; Vikki Slade; Tony Vaughan.
Questions 208 - 270
Witnesses
I: Sarah Sackman KC MP, Minister for Courts and Legal Services, Ministry of Justice; Jane Harbottle CBE, Chief Executive, Legal Aid Agency; and Farah Ziaulla, Joint Director for Legal Aid and Legal Support, Ministry of Justice.
Written evidence from witnesses:
Witnesses: Sarah Sackman KC MP, Jane Harbottle and Farah Ziaulla.
Chair: Welcome to this afternoon’s session of the Justice Committee. This is the final evidence session of the long inquiry that we are doing on access to justice. We are therefore very pleased to have the Minister of State, Sarah Sackman KC, to give evidence before us, accompanied by some of her senior civil servants, who will be introduced in a moment. First, members of the Committee will make their declarations of interest, starting with Sir Ashley Fox.
Sir Ashley Fox: I am Ashley Fox, the Member of Parliament for Bridgwater. I am a former solicitor and my interests are on the register.
Dr Shastri-Hurst: I am Neil Shastri-Hurst, the Member of Parliament for Solihull West and Shirley. I am a barrister with a current practising certificate and my interests are as declared on the register.
Chair: I am Andy Slaughter. I am the Chair of the Committee and the Member of Parliament for Hammersmith and Chiswick. I am a non-practising barrister, a member of the GMB and Unite trade unions and a patron of two justice-related charities: the Upper Room, for ex-offenders, and Hammersmith and Fulham Law Centre.
Vikki Slade: I am Vikki Slade, the MP for Mid Dorset and North Poole. My interests are as per the register, but none is relevant to this Committee.
Tessa Munt: My name is Tessa Munt. I am the Member of Parliament for Wells and Mendip Hills, in Somerset. I am a vice-chair of the all-party parliamentary group on penal affairs, and a director of WhistleblowersUK, which is a non-profit-making organisation.
Sarah Russell: Hello. My name is Sarah Russell. I am the Member of Parliament for Congleton. I am a solicitor, with a current practising certificate. I did employment law for 13 or 14 years before I came here. I am the chair of the all-party parliamentary group on access to justice, and a member of various other APPGs and trade unions.
Pam Cox: Good afternoon. I am Pam Cox, the chair of the all-party parliamentary group on penal affairs, and my other interests are as declared.
Warinder Juss: Good afternoon. I am Warinder Juss, the Member of Parliament for Wolverhampton West. I am a solicitor, but not practising at the moment. I am a member of the GMB trade union central executive council and of various APPGs.
Tony Vaughan: Hello. I am Tony Vaughan, the MP for Folkestone and Hythe. I am a barrister with a practising certificate. I was formerly an independent funding adjudicator for the Legal Aid Agency; otherwise I draw attention to my registered interests.
Q208 Chair: Thank you very much. Ms Sackman, would you like to introduce yourself and your colleagues?
Sarah Sackman: Thank you, Chair, and good afternoon. To my right is Ms Jane Harbottle, the chief executive of the Legal Aid Agency. To my left is Farah Ziaulla, director for legal aid and legal support at the MOJ.
Q209 Chair: I will begin with a few general questions. We received over 200 written evidence submissions for this inquiry, and they painted a pretty dramatically bad picture of the state of access to justice, which I am sure we all here agree is a fundamental principle of the rule of law and a functioning civil society. Do you agree with that bleak picture, and where do you think the most acute problems are?
Sarah Sackman: Access to justice is the right that makes all other rights real. You are right to say that that constitutional right to access the courts is fundamental in a democratic society. I also believe that it is fundamental to social and economic justice.
When one considers that it was almost 80 years ago that, out of the ashes of war, the Attlee Government created the legal aid system as a pillar of the welfare state, I think that, today, in government we should be no less ambitious in our attempts to revive it. But you are right: the inheritance that we received as a Government was dire. It is fair to say that, over consecutive Governments, the approach to legal aid has been one of managed decline. Whether in terms of the workforce, the provision or the systems on which our legal aid and legal support systems sit—be they digital or in terms of people—we inherited a system that was in dire need of investment. Morale was low. Eligibility and scope had been slashed.
I think that the inquiry that the Committee is undertaking is well timed, because in my time in this role I have seen my primary goal as one of stabilisation. Unless we can fix the foundations of our legal aid system and of access to justice in this country, the bold approach that I believe is possible and necessary will not be possible.
In what is coming up to two years in government, we have sought to stabilise the system by making the necessary investment in both criminal and civil legal aid, targeted at areas that have been identified precisely because they are the ones of most acute need: the duty solicitor scheme in crime, prison law, immigration, housing. All of that is vital investment, which we can go into in more detail, in order to stabilise the system. There is major investment, too, in the IT systems—the digital systems—on which legal aid is dispatched.
Looking ahead to the future, with that stabilisation I think we are beginning to see some green shoots in terms of the number of providers entering the market and the retention of legal aid providers there. I hope that, by fixing the foundations, we can turn our ambitions to building the bold vision of access to justice to which this Government and I aspire—one that harnesses the potential of technology to lower barriers to accessing justice and develops the new pipeline of legal aid practitioners, through the investment we are making in publicly funded pupillages.
Ultimately, all of that is about empowering people. I end this opening answer where I started. Access to justice makes rights real. The rights that we extend to people are not worth a jot if they cannot be enforced in a court of law. That is not just about what happens in court. It is about what happens in the shadow of the law, as people go about their lives knowing that the justice system is there for those who need it. If we are to vindicate the promise that the Attlee Government made to the British people back in 1949, I believe we can be just as ambitious in reviving the fortunes of legal aid in 2029.
Q210 Chair: You covered a lot of bases there. One issue you mentioned was eligibility. I will ask you a couple of questions about that. The gross income eligibility threshold in the magistrates court is currently £22,325, which means that a single person working full time at the minimum wage earns too much to be eligible. How can that be justified?
Sarah Sackman: The choices made by previous Governments in LASPO in relation to eligibility have, without doubt, had the effect of residualising access to legal aid. Legal aid was always, in its conception, designed to ensure that those without the ability to pay to access the court could do so. I well appreciate that when the scheme was conceived it captured a far greater proportion of the population than it does now. As you say, the eligibility thresholds mean that it is a finite resource that is targeted at the poorest in society. Building on the evidence base in the RoCLA report, which looked at the means test and the question of taking into account not just income but other costs of living, the Government will set out our plans in due course with regard to revisiting the whole question of eligibility.
Q211 Chair: I note the classic phrase “in due course”. One consequence of that low threshold—or high threshold—is that, in the latest data that we have, which is from about three years ago, 48% of defendants appearing in magistrates courts for imprisonable summary offences were unrepresented. Nearly half of defendants facing possible prison sentences have no legal representation. That cannot be right, can it?
Sarah Sackman: As things stand, 31% of those who appear in the magistrates court are publicly funded and 97% of those who apply for legal aid receive it. People may be litigants in person for a host of reasons. Some of that may be to do with choice. It may be that they have substantial means and simply choose—
Q212 Chair: What, 48%?
Sarah Sackman: No. I do not deny the force of what is being put to me. That has been the case for some time now. As I alluded to in opening, coming into government we faced some pretty stark choices. Civil practitioners in housing and immigration had not received a pay increase since 1996. We put that right, with £20 million-worth of investment. We could also see that those that you are talking about—even with the residual number who are represented in our criminal courts, you had duty solicitor schemes literally collapsing. Again, we have put that right by investing £116 million in criminal legal aid fees for solicitors, in steady state. That is a substantial new investment.
You are right to push me in relation to eligibility. Do I think that that coverage is generous enough, as things stand? No, I do not, but there are choices to be made about ensuring that the needs even of the 31% who are eligible under the current thresholds are actually met. In a system where we see attrition among duty solicitors and criminal legal aid practitioners, who had not seen a pay rise in a very long time, I believe that that was the right choice to make within the first two years of the Government.
Q213 Sarah Russell: Minister Sackman, you referred to the fact that 48% of people are unrepresented in the magistrates court. In the Crown court, where people are accused of exceptionally serious offences, the total household income to entitle someone to eligibility is £37,000. That could potentially be two people’s earnings, not just one. Significant numbers of people will be completely unrepresented in the Crown court.
First, you say that we have put things right in the legal aid system and are being ambitious around the Attlee Government’s vision. Do you consider that that meets that test? Secondly, what assessment have the Government made of how long trials take where people are unrepresented litigants in person? What is the potential cost of that in the system?
Sarah Sackman: What I was trying to say was that that is the aspiration. My aspiration is a bold one that revives the system, because I believe in it. I reject the managed decline approach of predecessors in my position, but I cannot get to that bold vision unless I am serious about stabilisation.
You are right to highlight litigants in person in the criminal court. One thing that the Department is looking at afresh is the support that we provide to litigants in person in the magistrates court or, indeed, the Crown court. There is provision in place in the form of a hardship mechanism where, while someone may not be eligible, the costs that are borne are deemed to be of a level where funds should be provided. There is the duty solicitor scheme. The system, of course, whether through judges or the legal adviser role in the magistrates court, is used to dealing with litigants in person. That is part of the equal treatment handbook. Access to the court should not depend on whether one has representation of the most expensive or the cheapest kind, or none at all. You should still be able to access the court.
I take the point. I am not comfortable with the number of litigants in person. My own practice was, I grant you, a civil not a criminal one, but I know from it that some of the processes in our courts can be difficult for litigants in person to navigate. Where there are legal rather than factual issues, staying focused on the relevant issues can be more challenging where there is not legal representation. Please do not misunderstand me. I am not comfortable with the situation, but politics is the business of choices. To govern is to choose. We made some pretty bold choices early on in this Government. We have to make sure that those bed in and work. Implementation takes time. As I said, the way we approach and support litigants in person is something where the Department is looking to build on existing support that is provided.
Q214 Sarah Russell: Minister, could I press you on the second half of the question: what assessment has the Department made of the impact on trial time of unrepresented litigants in person, and how much does that cost within the system?
Sarah Sackman: I know this is something we have sought to look at. It is one of those things that is quite tricky and complex to collect data on, but I think that Ms Ziaulla might want to comment on some of the detail.
Farah Ziaulla: Yes, absolutely. As you say, we recognise that this is something we need a much better understanding of holistically at a systemic level. We hear a lot, anecdotally. As the Minister referred to, there are various interventions in place to support litigants in person. One of the PAC’s recommendations was that the MOJ and HMCTS should work together on a scoping study to look precisely at the impact of litigants in person in terms of the costs and efficiencies of trials and cases progressing through the system. That is something that we are working on with HMCTS. We look forward to having a much more robust sense of the data. Then we can determine what the most appropriate action, or suite of options, might be to take forward.
Q215 Dr Shastri-Hurst: Currently there are no official regularly published statistics on defendants who are unrepresented at magistrates court hearings. Are there any plans to publish the data?
Sarah Sackman: I think you heard the answer that Ms Ziaulla just gave about trying to get a handle on the data and the impact that that is having. There are no current plans to publish the data, but no doubt it is something we will want to look at. As a Department, generally speaking, we collect an awful lot of data, and we look to publish it and to be as transparent as possible. No doubt, as part of that exercise, the total numbers that we see in different jurisdictions are something we could look to collect and publish. There are no current plans, but the point raised is a good one.
Q216 Dr Shastri-Hurst: It has previously been published, in response to a parliamentary question, so it is clear that the data can be found if that is wanted. The Lammy review in 2017 recommended that the data should be published on a regular basis, and the Office for Statistics Regulation said that it is a crucial measure of access to justice. Given that the Lord Chancellor believes it should be published, why is there no active plan by this Government to deliver that?
Sarah Sackman: You make a good point, and it is one that we can take away from the Committee to look at its desirability. The only thing is that, as with all data, it is important, first, that the data is robust and paints a complete picture and, secondly, that it is set in its proper context. As I said earlier, while I do not deny that one reason—maybe even the primary reason—why people find themselves representing themselves is the eligibility for legal aid, there may be other drivers, too. I think you would want to understand that as well. You make a good point, and it is one that we can take away, but I would want to consider it holistically in terms of what data we have and how we gather it, and to ensure that it was presented in its proper context.
Q217 Dr Shastri-Hurst: Sticking with eligibility for a moment, the last Conservative Government announced, in 2023, plans to increase the income thresholds by £3,000 for civil claims and £12,000 for criminal cases. You have now been in government for the best part of two years. How come that has not been implemented yet?
Sarah Sackman: You are right that the previous Government implemented the first phase of their means test review, after 14 years in government. We have taken a different approach, which I began to set out in relation to stabilisation. We prioritised the fees side of things, and I think that was the right thing to do, because if we do not have the legal aid providers to service even those who are eligible under the existing thresholds—if we do not have them to carry out the work—there is no point in extending eligibility. That is the choice that we made in the last just under two years or so. As I indicated to the Chair, we will set out our plans in response to the means test review exercise that was conducted—
Q218 Chair: Can you say roughly when?
Sarah Sackman: I can say it will be this summer that we will set out our approach. It is important to say that the evidence base gathered under the previous Government has informed some of our decision making, so the choice that I referred to earlier, to make investments in civil legal aid in relation to housing and immigration, which has been well received by those parts of the sector, was informed by that evidence base. It is an evidence base that we use, but I think that the choices that we made in relation to increasing fees and making investment in, particularly, our digital systems that support all the fee changes, are fully justified.
Q219 Dr Shastri-Hurst: Just so I can keep an eye out, when you say summer, is that before the House rises for summer or at some point between now and September?
Sarah Sackman: I am not going to commit to its being before the House rises. The summer is the summer, and we will, as I said, publish it in the summer phase, before the autumn.
Chair: By 21 September—I think that is the end.
Q220 Warinder Juss: Very quickly, is it your aim across all legal areas—that includes criminal and civil cases—to have as few litigants in person as possible? In my experience, there are delays in court procedures with litigants in person.
Sarah Sackman: You refer to all jurisdictions, and the premise of your question, I think, presupposes that a litigant in person is always a negative, if you like, because most people would choose to be represented in that context. I would say that, of course, we are committed to a legal aid system that has always been targeted at the poorest in society. That is the way it was designed, and certainly the way it has been administered for the last few decades, so that the question of access to justice does not depend on people’s wealth or ability to pay.
But I would say that there are contexts in which people’s ability to access the court without the need, necessarily, to be represented or have it mediated through lawyers might not necessarily be an undesirable thing. I can see that some have their heads in their hands, but I say it in this way: when tribunals were set up, the reality for many in the family courts is that the courts should be accessible to any person, irrespective of whether they have legal representation.
As someone who has practised law, of course I understand and believe in—and that is why we are investing in—the professions and the pipeline into those professions, because of how difficult these processes can be to navigate. But I do not take that as the only metric because, for all these processes, we need things not to be alienating to the individual, and not to set up barriers. We need to strip it back and explain it to people. We have to do that, as well, within the Ministry of Justice, in how we explain and simplify processes, so that we do not set up barriers to access to justice that are not just about money and representation, but also about people understanding what is going on in court.
I understand the force of your question, and of course I do not want to see a huge increase in the number of litigants in person. Of course it is a negative metric in most senses, but we also have a job of work to do to make sure that our courts and tribunals are accessible to ordinary citizens of this country in a way that does not always require things to be mediated through the professional language of legal professionals.
Chair: Finally on this, Tessa.
Q221 Tessa Munt: Yes, very quickly. Warinder asked part of my question. Have you considered actually asking or surveying every court user about whether they wanted legal advice? It is a simple tick, isn’t it? Then you will know. Your contention is that some people—perhaps many of those people—would want to do it themselves. My suspicion would be that that is not the case. I think a lot of people want help. I just wondered how much surveying you have done and whether you have considered doing that, so that you have facts as opposed to supposition.
Sarah Sackman: It is worth taking this in stages. There is the question of unmet demand in the context of who is eligible for legal aid under our current system, or even who might be eligible under a reviewed means test. Then there is the question of access to justice more generally. Legal aid has never been universal, however desirable I might think that is. The reality is—I say this with clear awareness in my role—that very often there is access to justice for the very wealthiest in our society and the very poorest, and there is not a whole lot of access to justice for those in between, who might need or wish to litigate.
That brings us to the importance of something like legal support. The Committee will be aware that the Government committed to £20 million-worth of multi-year funding for legal support, which often takes the form of law centres. They do brilliant work in providing people with free legal advice, and particularly early intervention, which can head off a lot of legal problems at the pass. As I said, there is the question of unmet demand within the current system, and we are currently undertaking a study of that. I might bring Ms Ziaulla in on that in a moment.
Then there is the wider question that you asked, Ms Munt, about everybody else who might wish to access the law and the courts. That is tricky, in a way. In some ways, it is a bit unknowable. Your proposition is, “Let’s survey everybody who comes to court and who would have wanted more legal support.” That would be one metric. But there might be a much larger number of people who never even come to the door of the court. They never litigate or defend a claim because that is not available to them. I am realistic about that. It is why I am such a strong believer in legal support, and why I am glad that we have made that multi-year investment. That is incredibly important: to bridge the gap between the wealthiest in society and the poorest, who at the moment are very often the only people who can access justice properly.
Chair: I do need to move on. We have some questions now from Tony Vaughan.
Q222 Tony Vaughan: Thank you for your answers, Minister, and thank you for the steps that you have taken, as you have described, to stabilise the system, particularly in areas that have not seen a pay rise for a long time.
I will ask about legal aid deserts. In January, the Public Accounts Committee reported that there are around 19 areas where housing and debt provision were in really short supply. Last week, I think, you issued an invitation to housing and debt providers in 45 areas to maintain strong coverage. Does this indicate that the gaps in provision are getting worse, and what is the Department doing to address that?
Sarah Sackman: The starting point has to be that it should not matter where in the country you live or what background you come from. You should be able to access legal support and, provided you are eligible, legal aid. We have to end the postcode lottery. I think that it is important to refer—I may bring Ms Harbottle in here in a moment—to the procurement of legal aid and indeed the coverage of legal support. We look to ensure that we have duty schemes covered across the country and aim for one provider per category of legal aid per procurement area, except in family, where the target is to have five. With the exception of nine out of 107 areas in family where we do have a shortfall, that coverage is there.
It is also important to refer to two things that are changing. One is within the Legal Aid Agency itself, which no doubt Ms Harbottle will refer to. That is the flexibility in contracting and procurement that the LAA has adopted more recently to take an always-on approach, allowing providers to enter the market at different points in the procurement cycle, removing requirements around having physical offices.
That brings me to my second point about remote access. In this day and age, of course being alive to the realities of digital exclusion and those areas of law and vulnerability where face to face is needed, the majority of people carry around with them a smartphone. The ability to access justice should be easier. Indeed, we should afford choice to people irrespective of income. Choice when it comes to provider and specialist should be far greater because, as I was increasingly doing before I came to this place, undertaking conferences and consultations with people through remote video mechanisms is a huge boon to access to justice.
I am saying that the principle is one of no postcode lottery. We think procurement is healthy to provide coverage. Some of the language around “deserts” is not hugely helpful and the flexible approach that the LAA has taken is a good one. Finally, I think that harnessing the potential of technology can help us alleviate deserts where they arise.
Q223 Tony Vaughan: In relation to the nature of what is called a desert, do you accept the Public Accounts Committee’s position that there are 19 areas of the country where there are real problems in access, or how would you characterise the nature of the deficit in the availability of legal advice in any particular areas of the country?
Sarah Sackman: It may be worth bringing in Ms Harbottle and then perhaps I can add to that.
Jane Harbottle: I recognise that. I think I told the Public Accounts Committee that position at the time, which was probably over a year ago. The Minister is right: the way people access services is changing throughout the legal market. Even in the legal aid market, people utilise more remote services, and we have adjusted our contracts accordingly. Currently, we are discussing with the contract bodies, the Law Society, LAPG and Advice Services Alliance the huge expense and cost that providers have in terms of office overheads, which is one of the absolutes in our contract. We are very specific about what time it has to be open and so on.
I am not dismissing concerns. There are still concerns across areas of the country where we struggle to meet our own standard. Last week you saw us changing our approach, now that we have our contracts always-on, now that providers can come in at any time, and now we take only three months to turn round those applications rather than a year. Currently, in housing and debt—your question was specifically about that—we have 21 areas where there is no face-to-face provision, so there is no one housed in a particular office. Now that we are not doing these huge monolithic tenders, I have some staff available who can drill down into these areas and work with providers locally to see what we can do. Nine of those areas are currently covered by outreach services, so providers from other areas of the country.
Q224 Tony Vaughan: In practical terms, does that involve setting up some sort of remote adviser who goes into the office of some other organisation that you commission?
Jane Harbottle: It could be a mix. We will work with providers on something that works for the people who are willing to provide the services, and in particular premises, etc. It could be outreach in a particular physical location. More likely, it is probably remote or could be a blend of the two.
Q225 Tony Vaughan: From the perspective of the public, how would they know about or go about accessing that?
Jane Harbottle: All the providers in those particular areas are told about accessibility and know that clients can access services those ways. We also have our civil legal advice telephone service which is advertised in court material and literature, and through advice services locally, and so on, and has been for many years. That is still used and available in all areas of England and Wales for housing and debt matters. There are a further 12 areas where we do not have outreach arrangements. They are reliant either on the phone service or remotely if they can get advice elsewhere, and also through HLPAS, which is a new service that provides on-the-day advice in court. In the lead-up to that, it also provides advice on welfare benefits and debt. We have full coverage in all those contracts at this moment. We have personally intervened in a couple of those just to make sure that we have managed to secure services in those areas.
Q226 Tony Vaughan: Minister, I want to ask about how we monitor demand. We spoke a moment ago about how it can be difficult to work out how many people never ended up asking for advice in the first place, or could not be represented. Your research in the civil legal aid review shows that we have an issue of rising demand and people being turned away. What is being done to better monitor demand, perhaps by imposing a duty on providers to record whether they have to turn people away, for example? I think you accepted that that is fundamental to understanding the real deficit here.
Sarah Sackman: To pick up quickly on the previous question and then come to the point about unmet demand, you heard in Ms Harbottle’s answer that there is good awareness of where there are gaps, and that the LAA, certainly from what I have seen, is proactive about seeking to plug those where they arise. For example, I know there have been issues around family law provision in Trafford. Getting in on the ground, seeking new providers and making sure they are sustainable is an approach that I have seen working well. The bigger and bolder ambition—I hope I do not say this in a starry-eyed way—is to get, under our transformed systems, a single front door whereby eventually the end user, the citizen, can apply directly to the Legal Aid Agency and be pointed in the direction of a suitable provider, be they very local to them or perhaps a bit further away. That would be a really desirable position for us to get to.
As for the point about unmet demand, I thank this Committee for highlighting this point over a number of years, because there is always a danger that absence of evidence is treated as evidence of absence. Of course, that cannot be right. What we are doing is undertaking more research in order to understand the position. The demand feasibility study published on 5 June, to which I think you were referring, is a helpful document because it steers us as to how we can routinely go about monitoring demand, including unmet demand, for civil legal aid by eligible individuals, which is really difficult to do. That is what it says, that it is really complicated, but it suggests a way forward. We have a pilot looking to monitor demand, building on that feasibility work. That is in train. We conduct regular provider surveys. That is a useful source of data. We have a survey that closed on 8 June, which will help us paint a pretty comprehensive picture, certainly of provider capacity but also of demand. Where are they turning away work that represents potentially unmet demand?
Q227 Tony Vaughan: Will it deal with the suggestion that they will take on work where they can make ends meet and reject work where they cannot? Some people have called it cherry-picking.
Sarah Sackman: I am making a more general point. There is the reality of capacity. You may have to turn away work because there just is not capacity. In so far as there are examples where people choose more lucrative areas, or certain areas that interest a firm more, ultimately there is a degree, even within publicly funded work, of commercial choice that firms will make, provided they adhere to the barristers’ profession cab rank rules and what have you. That still represents a serious problem, if not a failure of the market. On the point of getting a grip on this problem and understanding it, that survey provides us with rich information about what work firms are or are not able to take on, or do not choose to take on.
Q228 Tony Vaughan: How far do you think we are away from having the information you need to get the actions in place to address this issue? When the Lord Chancellor was before us in December, he told us that you had a new survey. You talked about providers and have given more detail about that. Given all of that, are we close to the point where you think you have enough information to attack the problem, or is a lot more needed before we can say that we can—
Sarah Sackman: I will answer that in two ways. First, we need more information. The report published on 5 June tells us that the way we need to approach this will take a bit of sophistication for us to get a real handle on it, so it is not job done; there is more work to do.
The second part of my answer is not to sit on my hands and say that because we do not know I will assume everything is hunky-dory. Of course not. That is why I am making the investments I am; that is why we are flexing the approach to procurement; that is why we are doing some flexible and dynamic things around paying people’s travel expenses so they can get further reach in terms of their provision. That is why we are doing all of those things, as well as the long-term work of not just stabilising but growing the provider base, whether that is match funding for 100 new publicly funded criminal pupillages at the Bar to start coming on stream in 2027, or whether it is some of the trainee schemes funded by the Legal Aid Agency.
I talked to somebody at Derbyshire Law Centre yesterday who described how they had benefited from that. They now have two new housing and welfare lawyers in their law centre because of funding provided by the Legal Aid Agency. That is not sitting on our hands while we wait for this information, but we need to make sure that data is not just data but is robust, so we are targeting the right thing.
Q229 Warinder Juss: Minister, in your introduction you mentioned the duty solicitor scheme. However, between October 2023 and 2025 the number of active duty solicitors decreased by nearly 30%. We know that criminal law is not deemed to be an attractive area for our young lawyers to go into. There have been cases where duty solicitors are working 24‑hour shifts and then getting up to do the rest of their work, and even cases of duty solicitors not being available to the extent that the police have had to release a suspect because the interview cannot go ahead without legal representation. What modelling or workforce planning have the Government done to make sure that we have a sufficient number of duty solicitors available?
Sarah Sackman: It is a really important point and one that I was seized of coming into this job—not just the attrition and numbers we are losing from the duty solicitor scheme but also some data that the Ministry of Justice holds in relation to the age of those solicitors. It is not just a problem we have now; it is a problem we will face in 10 or 15 years’ time as people come up to retirement. That was why, when we increased solicitors’ fees with an increased investment of £116 million annually in steady state, when we were making choices about where to target that money, I recognised it was important to focus on duty solicitors, as well as prison lawyers. That is another area where, partly because of the nature of the work going into prisons and into police cells, often at pretty ungodly hours, that kind of work is difficult.
It is certainly not a case of saying job done, but that is an important part of the stabilisation and to show that that investment is sustained for people making choices early on in their careers whether to stick with this area of law rather than perhaps switch to another—that that funding and those fee uplifts are there so that they can have some economic security. Within that, we also committed money—I am sure Ms Ziaulla will correct me if I do not get this exactly right—in relation to some of the travel expenses for duty solicitors, so that if it were outside their particular area they could get there, have those expenses paid and not be dissuaded from doing that kind of work.
You ask an important question. It was one that immediately jumped out at me when asked to make choices about what we should prioritise. It was clear that, if you cannot get your duty solicitor at the police station to inform you of your rights and help you navigate what can be a very important first phase of a criminal investigation or whatever, that is very serious. I hope that the investment we have made will achieve that stabilisation and then we will have to build on that.
Q230 Warinder Juss: This question may be for Ms Ziaulla or Ms Harbottle. Has the Legal Aid Agency done any investigation on this? The increase in criminal legal aid fees is obviously very welcome and is something that lawyers have been chasing. Has there been any kind of investigation done to suggest that it is having an appreciable effect in attracting more criminal defence lawyers into the profession?
Jane Harbottle: It is obviously very early days. We awarded a new contract on 1 October 2025. At the time, we attracted 1,021 providers. Now providers can come in at any time. Bear in mind this is completely new and it would not have happened before, and I stress that these are unofficial statistics to the end of April, but we now have 1,045. There are some green shoots because we have seen a 2% increase. We are getting on average about four new applications a month. What we are not seeing yet—it is a bit too early to tell—is whether that translates to more duty solicitors, or is further consolidation or fragmentation of the market.
The other point I must stress is that we also keep a register of accredited representatives. There are 2,148 representatives who serve police stations across England and Wales. This is an area where we need to improve our data. Because of issues in the past with the way we collated the data and the way it is reported to us, we cannot see any trends and whether it is going up or down. That is something my team has done a complete cleanse of, so that going forward we can see what the trend is for accredited police station representatives as well who will support the duty solicitors at the police station.
Farah Ziaulla: In addition to what Ms Harbottle said, it is important to note that all the schemes have remained covered as a result of the investment being made and the monitoring to which Ms Harbottle referred.
Just looping back very briefly to the earlier question about research the Department is undertaking, we have the feasibility study on demand. We also have the provider survey, which closed yesterday. That went to the whole provider base right across crime and civil. We also intend to do a profitability survey, which will look at what makes this work profitable, balancing both the fee levels and the administrative burdens, the overheads, what incentivises practitioners to do the work and what makes it feel prohibitive.
We are looking at a whole range of data. To go back to your question, we absolutely want to be able to act on it. We want to do that in an informed way when we have a holistic picture and are confident that, in taking that kind of multi-pronged approach, we have a lot of data on which to draw and are much further forward than in previous inquiries in relation to recommendations from the NAO and PAC that this is something we need to do. That informs all these investments, financial or otherwise, that we make in the system.
Q231 Pam Cox: Minister, turning to civil and family legal aid, in December the Lord Chancellor told us at Justice questions that the MOJ would “look across the piece” at civil legal aid. How is the MOJ planning to take action on civil legal aid schemes?
Sarah Sackman: The first thing we have done is to make the investment in housing and immigration. That was important to do in terms of both the scale of the investment—£20 million—and implementing those fees. That sounds simple and should be simple; it is not simple, because, as you will recall, we had a major criminal cyber-attack on what was, on any view, a system that was totally unfit for purpose. Getting that to those civil providers was incredibly important.
The other area, which I have not yet mentioned, is the biggest extension of legal aid, albeit not yet enforced but to which the Government are wholeheartedly committed, within the scope of the Hillsborough Bill. That is to support bereaved families at inquests where public authorities are interested persons. That is a huge extension of legal aid. When that comes into being, it will be really important not just in relation to vindicating the tireless campaigning of those who fought for the Hillsborough Bill but in representing something really fundamental about the balance of power in this country and who gets to be represented in those sorts of settings. That will not be means tested. Those are some really important early choices we have made.
I said earlier in response to Dr Shastri-Hurst’s question that we will set out our approach to the means test. That will have relevance to our approach more generally to civil legal aid. It is true to say that civil legal aid probably fared the worst when it came both to LASPO and, I am afraid, the cyber-attack, because we managed to reinstate our criminal legal aid systems quicker than our civil ones. I hope that we have given as a Government a very clear indication of our commitment to the future of civil legal aid by the investments we have made early in this Government.
Q232 Pam Cox: Turning to Ms Harbottle on a similar matter, last December you implemented legal help fee increases for immigration, asylum and housing. You cited at the time issues with IT systems as the reason why this was not more generally extended to civil representation. Are those issues now resolved, and when will that uplift be implemented?
Jane Harbottle: In terms of the timing of the uplift, that is a matter I will pass to Farah to cover. In terms of the impact of the cyber-attack, we have restored virtually all of our systems externally, or replaced them. However, we still carry a significant amount of contingency and forward work internally across the agency—crucial work, such as our ability to gather data and management information to be able to lay our accounts. We are also focusing on laying data foundations and improving our security posture going forward so that we can do the transformation work that the Minister set out. We will implement them as soon as possible. Farah may want to come in here with the policy position on that.
Farah Ziaulla: I will simply add that it has been fantastic that we have been able to implement £18 million of that uplift, which is the significant majority of it. That does not take away from the fact that there is £2 million for representation, as you say, and providers that we are very keen to get into the system. It would be remiss of me to commit to a date now, given the challenges we navigate in the aftermath of the cyber-attack; we want to make sure the system is robust to deal with implementation. It is something on which we are focused and we will look to do that as soon as possible.
Q233 Pam Cox: When you are able to implement the uplift, will you commit to ensuring that it is backdated to December 2025 to ensure continued viability for providers?
Farah Ziaulla: The position on uplifts is that they are forward-looking, not retrospective. That is the position that we expect to maintain.
Q234 Pam Cox: There is no room for negotiation on that.
Sarah Sackman: No. There is a practical point there, which is that we are dancing a little bit around the underlying system. Every time the Government—this is true for all shades of Government—announce a fee change or uplift, it is incredibly difficult to implement. There is a very simple reason for that, because of people who sat in my position for years and years ducking the big decisions around investment in what are absolutely atrocious legacy systems. By the end of this Parliament we may not have done the whole project, but we will be on reformed systems that are not just safe and secure, so we can hold people’s data in a lawful manner, but can do the very basics that our provider base in legal aid, and citizens, should expect. If you speak to practitioners, as I am sure members of this Committee do, they will tell you that they spend countless hours—often they tell me it is 30% to 40% of their time—wrestling with our dreadful systems. I do not want to keep announcing fee uplifts if we cannot implement them. It is incredibly difficult to backdate and do it retrospectively, so there is a practical as well as a principle barrier to it.
Q235 Pam Cox: Turning to family legal aid, you will know it is so important in tackling violence against women and girls that family members have solid access to justice. Will the forthcoming family justice strategy be accompanied by uplifts to family legal aid rates? This is of particular interest to this Committee, because we are taking a lead on organising a multi-Select Committee event on the family justice strategy very soon.
Sarah Sackman: That is really great to hear. I am sure that Baroness Levitt, who leads on family justice policy, will want to participate in that. I would love to come, if the invite is extended.
Pam Cox: Absolutely.
Sarah Sackman: There is no denying not only the challenging environment in family legal aid but also the critical role that I agree it plays in tackling violence against women and girls. It is why some of the legislative changes we have made in the Ministry of Justice—perhaps they are not ones that have made the headlines—to ensure the availability of legal aid in cases where domestic abuse arises are so important. For example, there is the equity disregard, where the simple fact that someone owns a property and perhaps had to flee that property does not of itself take them outside eligibility for legal aid. That is really important.
The other matter we are looking at, which is not a direct answer to your question but goes to who can access legal aid, is around the evidence tests and what somebody has to substantiate to demonstrate to the Legal Aid Agency that there is a risk of domestic abuse, or there has been actual domestic abuse, which means they have access to legal aid in the family court. Our approach to family legal aid will continue to be informed by the importance of targeting it at the most serious cases where domestic abuse and child abuse arises.
I have to be realistic with the Committee at this juncture. When one looks at the level of spend in family legal aid, which now sits at £854 million—almost £200 million in private, the rest in public—it is a substantial sum. What is interesting is that, particularly on the public family legal aid side, we have seen over the past decade that the amount the Government spend on family legal aid has gone up by about £260 million. That is not because there are more cases or because fees for family legal aid practitioners have gone up. There are other drivers of that, often to do with the length of time cases take.
I say all that because, as part of the family justice strategy, we need to look at outcomes and how we improve the timeliness of cases. It is why the child-focused courts on the private side are so important. It is not just legal aid spend per se—which, as I said, has grown but is not necessarily achieving better outcomes—or because there are more cases. When that strategy is published, I expect it will dovetail with the Government’s approach to reducing violence against women and girls, but it will also again need to be a holistic package. As I said, we look forward to the multi-Committee event.
Pam Cox: We look forward to the strategy. Thank you.
Chair: Before I bring in Ashley Fox, there are some short questions on this from Sarah and Vikki.
Q236 Sarah Russell: Minister, I have so many questions that I could ask, but I will contain myself for the sake of the rest of the Committee. You referred to the expansion of legal aid under the Hillsborough law, which I am sure everyone would absolutely agree will be a fantastic thing when it happens. My concern is that, when I discussed this with practitioners and I hosted an event about it, practitioners said to me in no uncertain terms that the current civil legal aid rates represent about 12% of their normal hourly rate and that it was inconceivable that they would do the work for the level of money currently on offer. Where do you think the practitioners will come from to provide this service? Do you have concerns that you are creating a public expectation, and that groups of bereaved families who have been through absolutely horrific circumstances will find it re-traumatising when they discover that the services they have been led to believe they will be able to access simply do not exist?
Sarah Sackman: Of course we have a responsibility where we make a commitment in statute to this that that commitment is realised. It is why the implementation of the commitment around the Hillsborough law for non-means-tested legal aid for bereaved families at inquest is a real focus for the Department. Part of that implementation involves consultation on the fee schemes, to which you referred, and about getting that set at the appropriate level. It is about issuing new contracts for this area of work, which is an area into which some legal aid providers will choose to move; others may not. It involves some of the digital changes that we needed to underpin all that. The funding of it will be important, too, because the approach will be to require the public authority that is involved in the inquest to cover the costs.
That is important because not only is that an approach that we generally take as a downstream Department, but it also goes to what we hope will encourage proportionate behaviours by those public authorities. If they have to cover the cost of the legal aid for a bereaved family, then, putting it very crudely, coming all silked up with an army of lawyers makes no sense. You have to look at the matter in a proportionate way and say, “Actually, does this really necessitate that, given this commitment to the principle of parity of arms and that we will have to cover the cost of the representatives and advisers of the bereaved families?” That provides some level of proportionality to the whole approach. I do not doubt that this is a significant challenge. It brings me back to what I said at the beginning: there is no point in having these rights on paper if we cannot deliver on them in reality. I have no interest whatsoever in being in a position where we let down those families twice over.
Q237 Vikki Slade: I want to touch on the issue of violence against women and girls and family legal aid. We raised with those who came to give evidence previously this issue of families where somebody claims legal aid and then uses that access to legal aid to continue domestic abuse in a very subtle way against another party. I give you the example of a father who was unemployed and therefore able to access legal aid. The mother of the children was working two jobs and had incurred tens of thousands of pounds in legal aid just to be able to keep accessing her own children. Her mother remortgaged her property to keep those children with their mum. Every time the mum challenged the truth about the father’s situation, the response was, “Well, he has legal aid and she hasn’t.” There is a real worry that it is all very well increasing family legal aid rates but not if that will perpetuate domestic abuse in a nasty, pernicious way. I urge you to really think about the impact on families of how legal aid is being abused.
Sarah Sackman: That example that you give speaks to the way in which we know that family court can become a site of re-traumatisation. There is a report out today that no doubt those on the Committee will have taken notice of. As you say, it perpetuates the very abuse that may be at issue in the case. Of course, one has to look at applications—as, indeed, decisions, whether they are about child arrangements or financial remedy—on an individual basis. To a large extent, we entrust our independent agencies such as the Legal Aid Agency, as we do our family judges, to see the truth of the matter and see wrong from right in those situations.
Obviously, what you describe is something that we have to be alive to. This is a real priority for this Government. The fact that the introduction of domestic abuse protection notices and domestic abuse protection orders, which have been established by this Government, are all covered by legal aid is testament to that. There will always be those cases that are horrific examples, but it is where the family court has to change. The points made in today’s report about transparency around the family court, the publication of more judgments and the fact that better technology, transcription and what have you is enabling us to do that is all to the good. It is not just about fee levels and money; it is also about outcomes and improving the conditions, processes and judgment, ultimately, within our family courts.
Q238 Sir Ashley Fox: Minister, in April 2025 you discovered that the Legal Aid Agency had been subject to a cyber-attack. My understanding is that information on providers and clients from 2007 through to May 2025 was hacked from 31 December 2024 to 16 May 2025. Is that correct, or do you have any more information that you want to give the Committee?
Sarah Sackman: I think that is correct.
Q239 Sir Ashley Fox: I understand that by November 2025 you had not informed individuals affected by the breach. Have you now done so?
Sarah Sackman: I will certainly ask Ms Harbottle to provide further detail on this. It was a criminal attack on legacy systems where a lot of personal data, subject quite rightly to GDPR and then ICO processes, was held in a very fragmented way. There is a lot of complexity around complying with those requirements, which of course we must do. That is why it continues to take time and the exercise is not yet complete in getting an understanding and then informing those whose personal data may have been stolen.
Q240 Sir Ashley Fox: More than a year after the attack, you still have not told the victims of the attack that their data has been breached.
Jane Harbottle: Shall I come in? We immediately issued a public notice on 19 May with regard to the data breach. We also informed the ICO, in line with our responsibilities and duties. We did that because some of the data that we believed was exfiltrated was extremely old and dated back to 2007. To just send out a notice to everybody without being able to identify particular individuals would perhaps have created a further—
Q241 Sir Ashley Fox: When you say you put out a notice, you put out a notice on the Government website, and that was it.
Jane Harbottle: Yes.
Q242 Sir Ashley Fox: Not everybody reads Government websites, so actually most people would not know that they had been a victim.
Jane Harbottle: No, we put out a notice on the Government website because we thought that was the most sensible and proportionate thing to do at the time. Just to reassure the Committee, the dark web is being monitored, and as far as we are aware no information has been shared. We take this data loss incredibly seriously, and I am extremely sorry for any distress caused. I also highlight just how fragmented this data is. It is incredibly difficult to piece together and identify individuals because of the state of our legacy systems. There is no one central data store that says, “I, Jane Harbottle, had a legal case. This is what it’s about. Here’s all the evidence.” We do not run case management systems; we run processing systems that gather some information. That is across 48 different IT systems and 100 different components. It is extremely fragmented.
We have had a group of data analysts trying to piece this information together and to build it back up to a picture so that we can say, “What information do we think was exfiltrated for Jane Harbottle?” That has proven extremely challenging. That work is more or less now drawing to a conclusion. There is another team at this moment quality assuring the data and also going through trying to de-duplicate data, because it may be that in one particular system there is my name, on another particular system there could be my date of birth, and trying to de-duplicate and link it all to an individual is the work that is concluding at this moment.
We have kept the ICO fully involved as to our investigations and the reasons for the delay. We hope very much to conclude the investigation and analysis, and have a searchable index to identify individuals, by the end of June. I am more than happy to write to the Committee with an update once that is completed with what that tells us. It has been extremely challenging, given the way that our legacy systems hold the data, to be able to extract it.
Q243 Sir Ashley Fox: You referred to name and date of birth, but, as I understand it, special categories of data have also been accessed: people’s health data, details of their sex life and sexual orientation, and then things like religious or philosophical beliefs and trade union membership. This leak goes way beyond name and date of birth, does it not?
Jane Harbottle: Perhaps.
Q244 Sir Ashley Fox: I find this astonishing. If a law firm had leaked this information, the Government would be all over this demanding action, yet here we are 12 months later, very sensitive personal data has been leaked, and you have not even told people that this has happened.
Sarah Sackman: Ms Harbottle has been really clear that we informed the public via the notice. We are complying with the ICO. It is important to remind ourselves that this was not a leak of our own making; it was the subject of a criminal cyber-attack, and a serious one at that. It is why the National Cyber Security Centre has been involved in helping us get to grips with it. You are absolutely right that the nature of the information, if one could piece it together, is incredibly sensitive, private information. The reason why this happened is because of criminals and the vulnerabilities of the system that we inherited, that no one bothered to invest in and put security around. That is what we have invested in: £200 million over this spending review will be invested in it.
Q245 Sir Ashley Fox: Minister, I know it was as a result of a criminal attack, but my concern is that 12 months later, whatever the cause of the leak, the victims do not know that they are victims of this attack. Admittedly, some of this information is very old—2007—but quite a lot of it will not be. It will be really quite recent. There seems to be no sense of urgency.
Sarah Sackman: I reject that.
Sir Ashley Fox: Okay.
Sarah Sackman: There has been a huge sense of urgency in two regards. First, there is keeping the show on the road at the Legal Aid Agency, even when we had to take our systems offline and ensure that no one who needed legal aid was denied it during that period. That took a huge amount of work and urgency. I saw real effort on the part of the Legal Aid Agency to restore the systems. Secondly, I reject the suggestion that there is a lack of urgency. We do not want to get the identification of victims wrong. We do not want to tell people they have been victims when they have not. This thing having gone as badly wrong as it did as a result of criminality, we have a responsibility as a public body to get it right, but please don’t let the Committee be in any doubt that there is any lack of urgency or a sense of complacency at the Legal Aid Agency. If there is, I have not seen it.
Q246 Sir Ashley Fox: I will move on. No doubt, providers and clients have suffered losses as a result of this breach. Are you aware of any claims for compensation from providers and victims?
Sarah Sackman: I am not aware of claims from victims. I am aware that there have been calls for compensation. In individual cases where there were specific reasons for additional costs, claims can be made under the Legal Aid Agency’s costs guidance, but there is no compensation scheme. That is for a couple of reasons. One is that, as I said, putting it colloquially—and I want to acknowledge the provider base here—we succeeded in keeping the show on the road through a series of contingency measures and an average payment scheme. Providers were able to take on work and keep their cash flow going during the period. They worked well, under significant pressure, with the Legal Aid Agency to keep things going. I want to thank them for that. Secondly, our approach should be to look to the future. We are making significant investment in restoring and transforming the system—
Q247 Sir Ashley Fox: My question was about compensation and the possible liability to the taxpayer for those liabilities. Can you give us an estimate of how much you think the taxpayer might be on the hook for, or are you not intending to pay any compensation?
Jane Harbottle: Is this for people whose data may have been breached?
Q248 Sir Ashley Fox: First, for providers who lost a great deal of time and effort in dealing with this issue, and, secondly, for potential victims.
Jane Harbottle: Okay. In terms of the provider base, as the Minister set out—
Sarah Sackman: There is no compensation.
Jane Harbottle: —in writing to this Committee, there are no plans for a compensation scheme. I add my thanks to what the Minister just said, because the provider base has been amazing. They have worked really collaboratively and co-operatively with us. Of course an attack of this magnitude and scale had an impact on them in the way they operate their business, not least—
Q249 Sir Ashley Fox: Fine. No compensation for providers. What about victims?
Jane Harbottle: For victims, we have some live litigation at this time. We have a couple of live litigation cases and a few pre-action letters. It is really not—
Sir Ashley Fox: You can’t give me a number.
Jane Harbottle: —appropriate for me to discuss at this time, so I cannot provide an answer at this moment.
Q250 Sir Ashley Fox: Okay, that’s fine. Moving on, the permanent secretary of the MOJ told the Public Accounts Committee that the MOJ wanted to spend more on IT systems but this was subject to allocations. How much funding has now been allocated to legal aid system transformation, and what assurance can you give us that this is sufficient?
Sarah Sackman: For 2026, we put in investment of £61 million, which represents over a 100% increase on the committed amount in 2023-24. Over the spending review period, there has been an allocation of £200 million in additional funding. Some of that will have already been directed at stabilising the system and standing up the security that is needed. The hope is that an investment of that magnitude over the spending review will allow us to move off the legacy systems and on to secure transformed systems, which will improve the user experience for providers.
Q251 Sir Ashley Fox: So you think that the £200 million will be sufficient to replace those inadequate systems that you have described and said are totally unfit for purpose.
Sarah Sackman: I do. I cannot say with absolute certainty that that work will be complete within the spending review period, but I think that that represents a significant investment capable of achieving that goal, yes.
Q252 Sir Ashley Fox: That takes us to March 2029.
Sarah Sackman: That is right.
Sir Ashley Fox: Fine.
Q253 Tessa Munt: You referred to the new legal support grant that runs from this October to March 2029. What lessons have been learned from previous grants going on at the moment? We certainly heard evidence that legal advice organisations are completely overwhelmed by the demand for their services and they are under-resourced. When we look at the Welsh Government example, they have a nationwide advice strategy, which seems to help support the provision of social welfare advice services. Why is the Welsh example not reflected here? What are you planning or doing to support the sustainability of the advice sector? As I said, what have you learned from previous and ongoing grants? Those are three questions, sorry.
Sarah Sackman: I am absolutely passionate about legal support. I started my career at the free legal advice centre in Toynbee Hall, so I am in no doubt about the value that legal support provides in terms of helping people access justice, understand their rights and be able to advocate for themselves or find a lawyer. What pleases me about the approach that we are taking is not just the commitment to multi-year funding, the £20 million over the next three years to enable those who receive legal support grants to plan and plan ahead to do the brilliant work that they do. There is also the fact that the Ministry of Justice, through the legal support strategy group, is taking a strategic approach. I attended a couple of its meetings, and around the table a bit like this one we had people from law centres and Citizens Advice, practitioners and different representative bodies bringing together that work. They do a lot of research and evaluations so that there is an evidence base for what a lot of us around this table and I understand intuitively: the value of legal support. That will secure its future and make sure that grant is targeted in the best places to get the best impact for the citizen.
The other thing I would say to your question is that it is clear that there is a need for far more joined-up thinking across Government. I sought to engage with other Government Departments such as the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government and the Department of Health and Social Care, thinking about two things in particular. One is advice sector budgets. Speaking to the Derbyshire Law Centre yesterday, a whole chunk of its budget comes from the MOJ and a chunk of its budget comes from the local authority. There is thinking about budgets in a joined-up way. The other thing is about where we deliver legal support. Can we think much more creatively about co-location of services? The Government are rolling out a new generation of Best Start hubs and neighbourhood health centres. What would it mean to have legal support provided in those spaces where many of those affected by legal problems might want to access legal advice? That cross-Government and strategic work that is happening within the group will prove incredibly valuable over the long term.
Q254 Tessa Munt: Thank you. Can you give me your view of the Welsh system? I would be interested to know what you think of that nationwide approach.
Sarah Sackman: In general terms, I am attracted to a national strategy, and in my wildest dreams I am attracted to the idea of a national legal service. We have this mixture of provision, don’t we, that we have been discussing today of legal aid, private providers, charitable providers and state funding? Having a coherent joint system of the sort for which the LAPG and others have advocated is something I certainly find attractive. The work of the Legal Support Strategy Delivery Group and the research and evaluation that it is commissioning and reviewing could, I hope, in time provide a framework for how we develop that. As the Minister with responsibility for legal aid and legal support, that is something that certainly animates me. A national legal service—wouldn’t that be a great thing?
Q255 Tessa Munt: Yes, because if there is some sort of universality it helps people in areas like mine that are incredibly rural. We already know, do we not, that there are 1.6 million people who are not online at all and 23% of people have very low digital capability? Quite a lot of people, if they need to go to court in my area, have to leave the day before if they are reliant on public transport. Justice is not accessible in rural England. If you do not have a car, you are completely banjaxed. It is that whole thing where there are so many people who do not have access to justice, not just geographically but also, as you talked about, in digital stuff. Having a national and nationwide service would mean that people knew where they could find help. At the moment, if somebody in my area thinks they have to go to Bristol to get help—that is where the nearest legal centres are deemed to be—that is quite a long way and the buses do not join up. I have one station in my constituency that I drive 20 miles to. It is not accessible at all. I wonder what your vision might be.
Sarah Sackman: I will bring in Ms Ziaulla in a moment. I take the point around digital exclusion, which is a separate issue. In this regard, a common universal badging of services might have merit. It is not within our current plans, but I said to you that it is an aspiration. This is where the harnessing of technology and remote access can be totally game changing. When you look at the funding that the Ministry of Justice provides to the Advicenow website, the way that we are developing digital tools, the gov.uk website around child arrangements and the pathways and using digital tools to allow people to gain support online as well as signposting them to a legal support provider, these are potentially game changing if we harness them in the right way and could be game changing for your constituents as well as my constituents in an urban area.
I am an MP in the most populous borough in London. We do not have a law centre. We set up a pop-up one for which there is huge demand. There are challenges in different parts of the country. It would be good if people know where they can be signposted for help, and where they can access help that works around their lives—whether there is that reality of digital exclusion or they have a very busy working life or caring responsibilities that mean they do not want to have to travel long distances to have a face-to-face but a video conference with someone really well qualified would do just as well. Technology has rich potential for realising some of the promise of access to justice, which I know that everyone in this room is committed to.
Farah Ziaulla: The signposting is critical. There is a wider ecosystem of agencies, advice centres and bodies that exists doing fantastic work and keen to signpost if they themselves do not cover a particular area, either geographically or from a subject perspective. I know from my conversations with them that they want to be able to tell people where to go and have that online and in-person offering as well. In terms of the existing grant that has been extended by six months, an interim evaluation absolutely spoke to the value of that information and support. To give you a couple of figures, that grant has supported 110,000 people with 163,000 legal issues over that period, and those issues were primarily related to welfare rights and housing. Advisers reported that 73% of clients displayed a better understanding because it is navigating what the issues are in the first place and ensuring that they do not start to cluster and become overwhelming.
As the Minister said, our focus for the future and our intention in having a multi-year funding approach is that we have certainty and can provide that certainty to organisations that are funded by the future grant in terms of their operation. We are working with the Legal Strategy Support Delivery Group and building an outcomes framework into that process and a live evaluation so that we know how to target the services and what has the maximum impact. That can inform future funding and future initiatives. This is where we interact with people who are most vulnerable, so it is a bit odd to say this, but it feels like a very exciting moment for the funding and the strategy of the sector, because we are building on all the good work that these fantastic organisations do—they work very collaboratively with us—with the intention of having a clear evidence base that informs that future approach. As the Minister said, that goes to co-location of services so that individuals do not have to go to a law centre or legal adviser. They might be able to access that support in a GP surgery. It is looking at what is more accessible and perhaps less intimidating as well.
Tessa Munt: I just raise the flag for those people who somehow have to go 7 miles to a surgery. Their kids go 8 miles to school. They go 20 miles to a station. There are no buses. The library is shut. On and on it goes. They have no mobile signal. Even in the city of Wells, the whole of east Wells has no mobile signal. Can you afford a computer? Do you have access to the internet? No, you do not. You need to bring services to people, please, all the time. I will stop there, otherwise I could wang on for ages.
Q256 Tony Vaughan: Staying with this theme, I want to ask Ms Ziaulla about chatbots. More and more people use them because, as we said, there are barriers to accessing legal advice and representation. What are the Government doing to address the risks inherent in that? I think things are being done, but I could not find them when I looked before this session. What is being done to help people identify what law could potentially apply in any given situation? Even if you make it clear that it is not a total picture of the law that could apply in any particular situation, it is perhaps at least a starting point. I wonder what you think about those things.
Farah Ziaulla: Absolutely. This is an area where, for all of us individual citizens as well as users of the service, technology is moving on so swiftly. For the Government, it is key that we keep pace with that and look at the opportunities that that offers. We know that the advice services that we work with as well as what we do internally are very keen to capitalise on that. As you say, there are challenges and risks. We need to be mindful of the information that can be generated and that people are not reliant on information that we are not clear is robust. There is quite a lot that we are doing within the Ministry of Justice. We are holding ourselves out as a leader within Government in terms of our AI approach. We are also looking at the use of AI in our transformation approach, both in the transformation of the Ministry of Justice approach to services overall and within legal aid. There is a lot that we are doing here. I might need to refer to my notes quickly to pull out a couple of specific examples. It is something that we are really live to. We absolutely see the benefits and want to ensure that we utilise that technology in the way that we are supporting it.
Q257 Tony Vaughan: Are the Government moving towards a system where you can put all the law in one large language model to allow somebody to put in their factual scenario and at least it pulls up a series of various laws? There is a finite amount of law. There is a lot of it, but it is only really accessible to people who can pay for Westlaw or whatever to find out something that will tell you the statute, the secondary legislation and the cases that have interpreted that. There is no reason in principle why a citizen should not be able to access that or why anybody should be prevented from accessing that simply because of money. I just wondered where we were with that.
Jane Harbottle: The Legal Aid Agency within the Ministry of Justice now sits within the service transformation group. As part of that group, there is an AI unit leading on AI thinking across Government and it has done some really creative things like Justice Transcribe to help free up probation resource and work in the family courts as well. This is a live conversation that we have been having. If people are going to do it anyway, look on their own phone and get potentially incorrect information back, there is a broader conversation to be had. Maybe I am speaking out of turn because we have not discussed this yet ministerially, but there is a conversation to be had about the role that the MOJ or somebody else plays in terms of ensuring that there is a repository of quality-assured information. You can partner with tech companies and so on that will model these and do this for you. That is a live conversation at this moment in time.
The other thing is that we have four big aims for our legal aid transformation programme, granted that, at the moment, this is for people who can get legal aid. The first is to reduce provider administrative burden. As Minister Sackman said, the overheads of doing legal aid and the friction of doing business are far too great. We have to take that out. Secondly, there is simpler, faster, fairer access for clients. If somebody is entering the legal aid system, can we do something with tech to indicate if they will be likely to be eligible for legal aid? If not, could we triage them to other sources of advice and help, or Advice Services Alliance services? How could we use that front-end interface more creatively? Could we do the means test in the background for the client and refer it on to a provider? Then, hey, we would know exactly what cases providers were and were not taking, wouldn’t we, because we would have it all in the system? The obvious thing following the cyber-attack is that anything we build has secure assurance built in, and so on.
The third thing is to enable the LAA to process and make decisions at a far faster rate and pace than we do now, so that people have certainty of legal aid funding sooner rather than later and their bills can be paid hopefully on a more—
Q258 Tony Vaughan: How far along the road are you to actually using the technology to practical effect? All the things that you said are really exciting. They strike me as all being urgent and should be progressing. Often you use the words “at pace”, but that can mean anything. This is an area where it seems to me you have huge potential to cut costs in the long term. If there was a little bit more investment or urgency, it could result in a lot of savings further down the line, particularly as the Crown has copyright over every single piece of law that is passed. I remember working with legal aid providers who could not even afford Westlaw, and that seems mad given that you own the copyright on all the law.
Jane Harbottle: I cannot give you a timeframe in terms of the wider piece of work that you are talking about. I have a real-life practical example. We are piloting a piece of AI with my operational caseworkers at this moment. You know what LASPO regulations and legislation are like. It is complicated. It really helps them very quickly get to, “Is this matter in scope? What is the guidance around it? Am I applying the correct criteria?” It takes them to the correct place. I think we are at 95% accuracy already, and that is in a matter of weeks. That is the sort of thing that we want to build into our transform systems. Why is that not available to providers? That would really help them cut down on their administration. This is why reducing provider administration costs is absolutely first and foremost in our transformation journey, as well as easier and better access for clients.
Q259 Tony Vaughan: Lastly, just so I am clear, who is the ministerial lead on that? Is it Minister Sackman? I did not know whether one of the Law Officers was also leading.
Sarah Sackman: Lord Timpson leads on a lot of this, but I would say it is pretty cross-cutting among the ministerial team at the MOJ. I spoke to the director with responsibility for transformation. At the risk of blowing our own trumpet, which we do not often get to do in the MOJ, the Ministry of Justice is first in class at the moment in terms of AI adoption and experimentation within Government. There are some really exciting things. If you look at the growth of the team of Justice AI within the Department in terms of the number and calibre of people we are pulling in, it is really exciting. There are all the things that Jane referred to.
To your point about, if people are going to do this anyway, how do we make sure that they are using correct information and we are not hallucinating and making up authorities or law but referring back to the gov.uk website, I mentioned the family law example. That is live already to help people understand their position. It takes you through a simple but verifiable user journey. What you and Jane have described is the future, and I do not think it is that far away. It is a real priority within the Department for all the reasons that you said—not just because of saving time and money, but because of the point about empowerment that we talked about earlier. Yes, of course, we have an aspiration that people should be able to access a lawyer and representation, and we want that to be available to as many people as possible. Knowledge is power, and the fact that this information is accessible to people, provided it is correct and we are building tools that people can have trust in, could be hugely empowering for the citizen—and it is happening.
Chair: No disrespect to our witnesses, but we are likely to have several votes soon and I want to try to get through as much business as possible. We have a couple of questions from Vikki Slade.
Q260 Vikki Slade: I will be as brief as I can on a similar issue. AI-driven legal tools and advice are not currently within the scope of regulation of the Legal Services Act. Given that so much is happening, is this sustainable? More broadly in terms of Legal Services Act reform, in oral evidence that we had a little while back, there was talk about the potential need for some reserved activities to be changed. Given the changes you are making in your use and the public’s use of AI, how is regulation also keeping pace with that? When it goes wrong, how will we take AI to court?
Sarah Sackman: As we have London Tech Week and so many of the stories, there is a huge amount going on in public discourse around the ethics and the approach to AI. That is no different in public services from how it is on social media and in other spheres. We cannot divorce ourselves from that huge responsibility. When I meet with the regulators, as I do on a regular basis, I always ask them, “What is your sense of the areas of risk? Where are the areas of vulnerability in our system? That is your job, not just to see the risks for the here and now but to anticipate that.” One area we have spoken about, both in terms of consumer protection and with a view to innovation, is the use of sandboxing—using our regulatory system and regulators to set up regulatory sandboxes for experimentation with AI so that when we begin to utilise it we can do it in a safe way. That is important. It is about identifying it as a risk area and making sure that it is an area of priority for regulators, but also enabling the innovation which will be so important to making all these tools available to people. It is, I suppose, one of several areas of challenge for our Legal Services Act and the regime. No doubt it will come out as an area of focus when we get the forthcoming review into the performance of the LSB, for example.
Q261 Vikki Slade: In a nutshell, you are open to reviewing whether such things might come into the scope of regulation in the future.
Sarah Sackman: Of course I have to be open to that. That is not the same as saying we are doing a wholesale review of the legislative framework, but of course we can and we must be open to that.
Vikki Slade: Thank you.
Q262 Tessa Munt: Your consultation on the Interest on Lawyers’ Client Accounts Scheme to raise additional money for the justice system closed relatively recently. In evidence to this Committee, Professor Linda Mulcahy was fairly critical of some of the specifics of your proposal—in particular, that it would not be administered independently. Are you likely to proceed with the scheme or something similar? Will you commit to independent administration of any additional funds that go to access for justice purposes?
Sarah Sackman: The Government will provide a full response to the consultation. We received many responses. It is important that we do that in a proper way and in proper time. I am not going to commit to any precise or specific form of any scheme. I will not pre-empt that now in this Committee. However, I am glad that you have drawn the link between the discussion today in relation to access to justice and the funding pressures to which a number of you alluded and the rationale behind the Interest on Lawyers’ Client Accounts Scheme. This model exists in other jurisdictions such as America, Canada and parts of Australia.
The reason we are consulting on the idea and we think it is a good model is precisely with that in mind. I was explicit about that in the foreword to the consultation. The linkage to access to justice is why we are entertaining this idea. It is for two reasons: first, the need that we have all spoken about for access to justice, and, secondly, the recognition that those firms in this country that deliver brilliant services to their clients and support lots of employment and businesses do so in no small part on the foundations of the British justice system. That depends on the integrity and viability of that system. They cannot go about their work without a rule of law that vindicates the promise of access to justice. That is the thinking behind this, and why we are exploring this idea.
Q263 Tessa Munt: What do you feel would be the disadvantages of having independent oversight of this?
Sarah Sackman: One can get into the details of a particular model. We have to decide first whether the principle is right. We have to get the design right. There may be advantages to having an independent operator. There may be advantages to do with administrative burden and cost, and then, where money is redirected to access to justice purposes, in keeping it within the Ministry of Justice. I can see pros and cons, but I am not going to speculate on what would be a preferable model.
Tessa Munt: Thank you.
Q264 Warinder Juss: I have a couple of questions on funding options. In its written submission to our inquiry, the Access to Justice Foundation suggested that there should be a mixed funding model to raise additional funds for access to justice. I know that the Government considered interest on lawyers’ client accounts, but have you considered any other options for funding models?
Sarah Sackman: A whole host of funding models is often in the minds of policy officials within the Ministry of Justice. The one that we consulted on is the ILCA model, the accruing of interest on client money, which seems to be treated in different ways by different firms—sometimes remitted back to the client, sometimes retained, but rarely critical to the profitability of those firms. That seems to us to be a model that has some merit, not least because it is a model that exists in other countries and where one can see the linkage for that shared responsibility for our justice system between more profitable firms and the wider access to justice ecosystem. To your question, of course there are other models that one might consider and that are kept under consideration within the Ministry of Justice, but this is the one that we have consulted on, that we are looking at most closely at the moment and on which we will provide a full response in due course.
Q265 Warinder Juss: Thank you. I have a very quick question.
Sarah Sackman: Sure. I will try to give a quick answer.
Warinder Juss: It is relevant to access to justice. I had a meeting with the Consumer Legal Association last week. It raised issues about third-party disclosure, in particular disclosure of information and police records from police forces. There have been instances apparently where there have been delays since April 2025 in the police’s disclosure of records. In one case, a six-month delay was considered acceptable. This obviously has a knock-on effect on lawyers being able to investigate and move on with their cases. Are you aware of any such issues? It may be something that I need to—
Sarah Sackman: That did not sound like a short question or a simple one, but it is a good one—no less good for that.
Warinder Juss: It may be something that I can take up with you later.
Sarah Sackman: With yours and the Chair’s permission, I can give you a more useful answer if I write to you and the Committee. That sounds like an alarmingly long time for that kind of disclosure, but I would want to look into it.
Chair: That would be helpful. There is no obvious reason why it should be happening.
Sarah Sackman: I agree.
Chair: It is variable between police forces, I think, but it is a problem everywhere.
Q266 Sarah Russell: Minister, the backlog in employment tribunals is now approaching five years. The backlog has gone up by 26,000 in the last year alone. It is a really steep increase. Have you had any thoughts about how it might be tackled?
Sarah Sackman: It is a serious issue. Much of our public debate is focused on backlogs in our criminal courts, and particularly in the Crown courts, but I am mindful that many people look to enforce their rights in our tribunals, not least the employment tribunal, and that level of delay and backlog is not acceptable. I am mindful, too, of the new generation of employment rights that I am proud that this Government created, but the tribunal needs to be in readiness, again so that those are not just rights written on paper but people know they can enforce them in a tribunal if they need to. It is not just about getting to the tribunal; it is knowing that, if you need to bargain or seek to enforce your rights within the employment context, if you needed to go to tribunal, you could and it would not take an awfully long time. That is really important.
This is about investing in capacity and ensuring there are enough tribunal judges and lay members. It is about diverting inappropriate cases, cases hitting the tribunal, whether that is through the role that will be played by the Fair Work Agency or mediation services such as ACAS, and ensuring that that is bolstered. We do not want to create barriers to accessing the employment tribunal. It is why we have not looked to introduce fees for accessing the tribunal. Timeliness is obviously an important component of justice, so the efforts around capacity and alternative dispute resolution are important. That is a real area of focus for me and the policy team.
Q267 Tessa Munt: Can I pick up on that, please? I think I am right in saying that the queue to get into the employment tribunal is about 80,000 cases, maybe slightly over. I have a particular interest—I have declared it already—in whistleblowing. The only route for people who have suffered detriment as whistleblowers is to go through the employment tribunal, and it can take years to go through. They are people who have usually lost their job as a result of being honest about something that has gone wrong in the organisation for which they work. Only workers can whistleblow, technically. We have to do something about this. You are talking about trying to filter—which is the word I use—people to some other resolution. The only thing, in my view, is to have an Office for the Whistleblower that can deal with those cases very specifically. I know that the Government considered this and it is in front of the Cabinet Office. There are lots of suggestions. I ask that very serious consideration is given to taking that group of people out of the employment tribunal, particularly if you are even half thinking of fees. If you are, that will be completely inappropriate for people who do not have any help and have very often lost their whole income. The employment tribunal is a total nightmare.
Sarah Sackman: Duly noted.
Tessa Munt: Thank you.
Q268 Chair: I will try to get in one more small topic in the last five minutes. We appreciate what the Government have done so far in relation to increasing some legal aid rates and taking steps where the problem is worse. We are nowhere near replacing what was lost over LASPO, so there is an increasing focus on third-party litigation funding. The first point is that you undertook to reverse the PACCAR judgment.
Sarah Sackman: We did.
Chair: We were expecting to see that in the King’s Speech. Could you tell us what is happening with that, and whether when you do that—as far as we know you still intend to—it will be retrospective, as the Civil Justice Council recommends?
Sarah Sackman: You are right that we announced our intention to legislate to reverse the effects of the PACCAR decision. You are also right, of course, that it was not in this King’s Speech. That is because of the many competing priorities that the Government have. That is not to dilute or reverse that stated intention. It was important to state it because it sends a signal of the Government’s intent, not least to those who are looking to litigate elsewhere or what have you. More generally, we are taking time to consider the other recommendations that the Civil Justice Council made in regard to litigation funding. Perhaps one advantage or silver lining of the delay is that it will give us further time to consider more holistic or wholesale changes that might be desirable, and we can bring forward our fuller response to that in due course.
Q269 Chair: You mean in terms of litigation funding from other sources.
Sarah Sackman: Yes, because that review was pretty wide-ranging, so there is a moment to reflect on those broader issues.
Q270 Chair: Is it part of your wish for a national legal service that you wish to see greater opportunities to cover legal costs? I will give an example. There was a significant event here yesterday for legal expense insurance and the idea that that which is familiar through household and motor insurance could be more of a form of social insurance for legal costs on a wider basis. Is the Ministry thinking about those sorts of changes that could give more access to justice?
Sarah Sackman: There is no formal plan in train. One has to be careful. I do not want this to be written up as “Courts Minister announces…”—fill in the gap. But—I hope I set out my stall in opening—we have a huge legacy in this country and a huge constitutional principle that has been recognised in the courts around access to justice. The inheritance of the Attlee Government is one that I take really seriously. My immediate inheritance coming into this role was dire, and everything that I have sought to do in my year and a half in this role has been to stabilise and rescue the system. I do not minimise for one second the scale of the challenge. Once we begin to see the green shoots of that investment, which I am confident that we will, we have to be bold and open our eyes to the possibility to reimagine what access to justice in this country could look like.
The LAPG’s paper on a national legal service talked about requiring a coherent understanding of the purpose of legal aid, legal support and litigation funding. It talked about the need for innovation and technology. It talked about the aspiration of that universal idea or a single national badging, referred to by Ms Munt. It also said that it might take a really energetic legal aid Minister to animate this subject and debate. What I see within the Ministry of Justice in this role is that we are entertaining these ideas and are open to them. ILCA itself is an example of that. How might we consult on different funding streams to really enliven access to justice? We have to keep our eyes open to these ideas because it is only in that way that we will revive and be ambitious, in the same way that they were post war when they set up the legal aid scheme.
Chair: That is a good place to finish. We are exactly on time, and we have something to do now, which is to go and vote. Thank you very much, Minister, and thank you Farah and Jane, too.