The government’s mismanagement of legal aid funding: the case of Middlesex Law Chambers

It won’t be news to anyone here that privatising public services – whether it’s the NHS, social care or housing – leads to them placing profit before people. And as successive governments have raced to make migrants’ lives (and indeed the lives of most marginalised groups) increasingly subject to hostile, complex and quickly-changing regulations, it’s no surprise that they have pushed people into reliance on these same, failing, services.

Legal aid is no exception to this, with the system now being a ‘market’ where legal aid providers ‘tender’ for contracts. In 2009 the ratio of asylum legal aid work done by private firms vs by not-for-profit organisations was 57% – 43%, but this has now shot up to 95% – 5%. Legal aid work has been so poorly funded that many legal aid providers are now either having to supplement income from elsewhere to make it financially viable (such as privately-paid work, or charitable grants if you’re a not-for-profit provider), or to ruthlessly cut costs.

Over recent years we’ve increasingly seen certain private law firms give in to the perverse incentive this system creates, to cut costs by cutting actual work. In the case of one firm, Middlesex Law Chambers, this strategy has imploded.

What has happened?

Middlesex Law Chambers is a private law firm that until recently held a legal aid contract in immigration including to provide legal advice in detention centres under the Detained Duty Advice Scheme. In August, their contract was terminated by the Legal Aid Agency following an “annual review” which found that standards were “not met”.

At the start of 2024 they had just one office doing immigration legal aid work, which increased to seven offices by the end of the year, spread across the country. In the year 2024-25 they opened a total of 3,318 legal aid files, of which 2,797 were in immigration – the highest number of all legal aid firms in England! In the same period they closed and billed over 2,500 immigration legal aid cases.

But up until just before their contract was ended it appears that they had only one solicitor and one senior caseworker accredited in immigration. That means that those two practitioners would have been completing more than five cases every single working day of the year, each.

It sounds pretty stressful for those two lawyers. Though perhaps this was offset by the profit the firm made from this model. In 2024-25 they made a whopping £1.7 million in income from the Legal Aid Agency (the fifth highest income nationally amongst firms doing immigration and asylum work). Over £1 million of this was profit. This is all public data.

Why are we complaining about a legal aid crisis then, you might ask, if two lawyers can get through almost 3,000 cases in a year and make such a profit from it?

Spoiler: they can’t

Making such high profit from immigration legal aid is only made possible by a combination of two things. First is the ‘fixed fee’ system, where a provider gets paid a fixed fee of £413 per adult asylum case (this amount if very little if you’re putting in the work that’s needed, but if you’re doing no or very little work then it all it can add up). Second is that quality reviews are not being carried out or followed up on by the Legal Aid Agency.

Many individuals and organisations, including us at Migrants Organise, have raised concerns to regulators over the last year about Middlesex taking on lots of clients who would never hear from them again, of the firm ‘missing’ important emails from authorities and then missing deadlines in clients’ cases. This was particularly harmful when it meant, for example, that someone was not told about their asylum claim being refused and so missed the opportunity to appeal which would then lead to an eviction notice for their accommodation. We also saw the Home Office refuse people’s claims on the grounds that no supporting evidence had been received, despite the person having provided evidence to their lawyer at Middlesex.

This has caused long delays in people’s cases, protracted time in undignified asylum accommodation and enormous stress and anger for those who have been seriously let down by those they were relying on to help them navigate a complex system.

Then in late August, people began hearing that their cases were being closed by Middlesex, as the Legal Aid Agency had terminated the firm’s legal aid contract.

Since then, people have been dropped by the firm en masse with only an email offering them no explanation, follow up steps or copy of their case file. Some people have missed their appeal hearings because the firm stopped responding to them without transferring access to the appeal online, and some have had their appeals dismissed. Some people have not been informed at all and we can only assume the firm has closed and billed their cases without contacting them.

The Legal Aid Agency has not provided any public communication to confirm that they have terminated the firm’s legal aid contract, except for a comment to a Guardian journalist to say that “firms that hold legal aid contracts are subject to annual reviews. These can lead to financial sanctions or, as in this case, contract termination where standards are not met.”

These people for the most part now have very little chance of finding legal advice in time for tribunal and Home Office deadlines. We believe the Legal Aid Agency can and should step in and ensure no one is left without support as a result of their decision to allow Middlesex to vastly increase its operations over recent years and then to close it overnight.

Questions must also be asked of the Solicitors Regulation Authority (SRA). It took only a week after the 2023 Daily Mail ‘sting’ on immigration lawyers for the SRA to take action to stop lawyers involved from working in regulated firms, but in the face of complaints of egregious negligence here we are not aware of any action being taken.

What we are doing about it?

To be clear, we fully support law firms – just as for public authorities – being held accountable when they have caused harm to individuals and misused public funds.

But when this so deeply impacts people’s lives – and we know from the files opened by Middlesex that the people were many – the Legal Aid Agency should manage a firm’s closure carefully. Assuming that a law firm which did not meet basic standards of service, would overnight begin to meet these standards when it comes to ensuring their clients were not put at risk by their closure, is wishful thinking at best.

Six organisations who are working closely with people who have been left unrepresented by the firm wrote to the Legal Aid Agency to ask that they fulfil their duty (and corresponding powers) to ensure legal aid is available to those who need it. In the Legal Aid Agency’s reply they did not comment on this point, but noted that “The LAA has no jurisdiction over firms without a legal aid contract” – which presumably now includes Middlesex Law Chambers. So the LAA has absolved itself of further responsibility.

We are in an extremely well-documented legal aid crisis, where 57% of people seeking asylum will be without legal aid (and Dr Jo Wilding’s most recent report shows that even people in London now will be unlikely to find a legal aid representative). To remove someone’s legal representation without any plan for an alternative is to leave people without any support at all. And this after their immigration cases stand a high chance of having been badly prepared – or not prepared at all.

The Legal Aid Agency has said they do not hold details of a firm’s open legal aid files, so presumably cannot know how many people are affected. So a group of organisations has begun to gather this information ourselves. And we plan on continuing to push our demand for people to have access to good legal aid until the Legal Aid Agency takes action.

What is the wider context to this?

Of course, Middlesex isn’t a lone case. Migrants Organise and four other organisations analysed some of the causes of the observed worsening quality of legal aid work in a report published earlier this year.

You can see from these tables that several other private law firms seem to have expanded their immigration legal aid cases exponentially since the previous government’s decision in 2021/22 to hold people in hotels in large numbers in areas of the country where they may have extremely limited access to advice and support. Coincidence?

In practice this looks like a firm taking on a vast number of cases, making it look like there isn’t a legal aid deficit in the region. They then do next to no work on the case, causing huge distress and obvious harm to clients. But because of the ‘fixed fee’ payment system for legal aid work on asylum cases, they still get paid.

This is in stark contrast to the consistently high-quality and dedicated work done by so many other legal aid providers who are struggling to keep services open faced with chronic underfunding.

While the government insists it has no money to invest in public services, such as legal aid, the Legal Aid Agency seems quite happy to spend money on work that has clearly been identified as sub-standard. Meanwhile, advice regulators’ approach seems to be to criminalise individual advisers and use fine money to fund “frontline policing and border security,” rather than to incentivise better work.

Middlesex’s £1 million profit pales in comparison to the near £200 million profit made by Clearsprings from government contracts to manage asylum hotels. But if it was diverted to fund and support the many legal aid providers out there doing excellent and vital work, it could have a big impact.

If you were represented by Middlesex Law Chambers, or knew people who were, please get in touch to join our efforts to hold the firm, and the Legal Aid Agency, accountable. Please email frances@migrantsorganise.org.

For those needing to apply for adjournments of their asylum appeal hearings (to delay the hearing) as a result of becoming unrepresented following the closure of Middlesex Law Chambers, there is a link to a template to make an application for an adjournment on the Right to Remain toolkit page.

The information in this article has been gathered through collective work by a group of different organisations and individuals. Thank you to everyone who has supported and fed into it so far. To find out more about this work, please contact the author.