A new report “Immigration legal aid and value for money: Identifying the missing data” has identified relevant data that can and should be collected by various bodies in order to properly determine the impact that legal aid cuts have had in relation to cost-shifting elsewhere. The report is from the University of Exeter, Public Law Project and Migrants Organise.

The report concludes that:

Where legal aid is inaccessible, there are significant economic and social costs that must be acknowledged. Given that the aim of LASPO was to deliver better value for money, there is an urgent need to improve understanding of whether this objective has been delivered. Although this report has focused on immigration legal aid, there remains uncertainty about whether LASPO has met its objectives across all areas of publicly funded law.

This report has outlined some key areas where data are currently unavailable and where better collection and publication of data would enable the hypotheses generated through qualitative evidence to be measured. To assess whether LASPO has in fact delivered value for money, there needs to be more detailed analysis of both the cost of reversing LASPO and widening the scope of immigration legal aid, as well as the potential savings across other parts of government. Understanding the full costs of LASPO is an essential part of improving governance and ensuring value for money for taxpayers.

Because of the size of the asylum appeals backlog and the lack of legal aid lawyers available to work on those appeals, of particular importance at present is data that could be published by HM Courts and Tribunals Service to help quantify the impact that the lack of lawyers is having. The report recommends that data is published on the number of immigration appeals heard with legal representation and without legal representation, the length of hearings and outcomes of appeals with and without legal representation, the number of immigration appeals adjourned due to the absence of legal representation and appeal waiting times including breakdown for represented and unrepresented cases, and adjournments.