18/07/2026
MPs plot a clear route map for legal aid - with Law Centre evidence:
The Justice Committee has published "Access to Justice: Legal Aid," the first of two reports from its nearly year-long access to justice inquiry. https://us.list-manage.com/rztbEuTWC1M?e=76e8b804fa&c2id=36d2c59eddd86a229e0ba79b27bb31d9&m=0b5pgBaoDze_lmkzSxYoCIt6kh-TvNOKz4AweJRSJvK6UtB8Qw4d6fkR6leu
This first report focuses on the provision, administration and sustainability of legal aid; a later report will look at the wider legal advice sector, digitalisation, funding, and the provision and regulation of legal services.
Its headline verdict is stark: access to justice in England and Wales has been "severely eroded" by the declining availability of legal aid; and a system that people cannot qualify for, access, or sustainably deliver "is no system at all".
The importance of the report is not only in its conclusions and recommendations, but in the breadth of agreement behind them.
The committee is chaired by Labour’s Andy Slaughter MP but its membership is cross-party. It situates its findings alongside the (Conservative-chaired) Public Accounts Committee’s warnings from January, about worsening legal aid provision.
Together, these reports show that the crisis in legal aid is no longer a sector complaint: it is the settled view of Parliament that the system is broken.
Law Centres Network (LCN) helped shape that official record. Our written and oral evidence is cited in the report; and Central England Law Centre is quoted on the reality of trying to recruit and retain lawyers, when legal aid work cannot compete with other parts of the profession.
The committee adopted many of the key arguments made by LCN and our sector partners: the justice gap, provider sustainability, legal aid deserts and droughts, workforce collapse, the need for early advice, the burden of legal aid administration, the case for a high-trust model, IT failures and the effects of the data breach, and the limits of remote advice where people are digitally excluded or need face-to-face support.
This does not simply confirm what Law Centres already know. It is our evidence, and the experience of our clients and communities, becoming part of Parliament’s account of what has gone wrong.
The stakes are clear. Underfunding does not make legal need disappear. It pushes costs into courts, councils, the NHS, schools, housing services and families. It drives managed decline, and stores up today’s problems for tomorrow.
It leaves frontline organisations like Law Centres to meet people’s needs without the resources to do so. The Justice Committee recognises that early legal help can stop problems escalating, and that LASPO’s narrow, fragmented scope too often forces people to wait until crisis point.
This report does not pull its punches, and should be treated as a route map for change.
It combines urgency with practical steps: uprating eligibility and keeping it under regular review; a similar, independent treatment of legal aid fees; a new legal aid workforce strategy; targeted action to restore provision in underserved areas; reducing and streamlining legal aid’s admin; piloting a high-trust model of work with providers; and stronger IT investment.
Beyond these steps, the report calls for a change of approach: more responsive to demand, and with a renewed focus on access to justice.
At its heart is a simple test: "The more people’s capability to identify and respond to legal problems is dependent on wealth, status, or power, the more access to justice is denied."
In meeting this challenge and restoring legal aid, the incoming government has an opportunity to leave a lasting legacy.
Please read the report and use its findings in support of arguments to improve the legal aid offer.
Law Centres Network Hackney Migrant Centre Hackney Labour Hackney South & Shoreditch Labour Party Hackney North and Stoke Newington Labour Party Ian Rathbone Lea Bridge Labour Hackney Margaret Gordon
