What is going on with the Legal Aid Agency

What is the Legal Aid Agency?

What is going on with the Legal Aid Agency?

Let’s start with ‘What is the Legal Aid Agency?’  It is an executive agency of the Ministry of Justice and provides legal aid for people involved in both civil and criminal cases in England and Wales.  Kerseys Solicitors have a contract with the LAA to provide legal aid services in Family cases. Most of the legally aided work we do is ‘public law’ which covers cases where social services are taking parents to court in relation to the care of their children. It is challenging and sometimes upsetting work but it is very worthwhile. The administration of civil legal aid is done through an online portal since 2016.

On 23 April 2025 providers of legal aid (solicitors and barristers) were contacted by the LAA to say that a ‘security incident’ had been identified and that financial information may have been accessed by a third party.  The message was fairly low key and the portal system stayed online.  That changed in early May when providers were advised that the system would be taken offline briefly so that the LAA do some work on it.  On 16 May the LAA advised that the attack was more serious than they had previously believed and the system would stay offline to ‘manage any further risk’.  There are some contingency arrangements in place to enable lawyers to keep working and taking on new cases, although concerns have been raised about the adequacy of those arrangements.

The current position is that legal aid solicitors and barristers doing civil work are unable to submit any bills for payment.  That means thousands of legal aid lawyers have had little or no income since early May. This is completely unprecedented and represents a serious threat to many people’s livelihoods yet there is very little coverage of it in the media, even the legal media. The contrast with the recent coverage of the cyber-attack on Marks & Spencer is striking.

Civil legal aid is vital to the running of our justice system and ensuring that disadvantaged people have access to legal advice and representation.  As well as Family Law there are legal aid lawyers specialising in Mental Health, Housing, Immigration, Benefits and Judicial Review. The number of lawyers undertaking legally aided work has reduced in recent years as the fees have not been increased with inflation and the current crisis may have the effect of reducing the numbers even further in the future.

Fortunately for Kerseys Solicitors, the legally aided work we do is not a large proportion of the firm’s work as a whole but there will be many solicitors’ firms and barristers (who are self-employed) facing a financial crisis as they have overheads, salaries, bills and mortgages to pay without the income to enable them to do so.

The most recent update as of 22 July is that the LAA are effectively building a new system which will start to be effective in September.  As yet there is no detail available in relation to how quickly the system will be fully up and running. In January 2025 the National Audit Office published a report that concluded that “the cyber threat to the government is severe and advancing quickly… The government’s cyber resilience levels are lower than it previously estimated, and departments have significant gaps in their system controls that are fundamental to their cyber resilience’’. What has happened to the LAA demonstrates how true that is.

Elaine Webb Partner and Solicitor in the Family Law team at Kerseys Solicitors in Ipswich.