Legal aid statistics quarterly: January to March 2025
Source: gov.uk (2025-11-20)

Activity in the legal aid system for England and Wales, including criminal and civil legal aid, family mediation, providers of legal aid, client characteristics and Central Funds payments.

Legal aid statistics publication presents statistics on the legal aid scheme administered by the Legal Aid Agency (LAA) for England and Wales. This edition comprises the first release of statistics for the three month period from January to March 2025 and also provides the latest statement of figures for all earlier periods. This edition also includes figures on central funds, providers of legal aid, inquests and the diversity of clients receiving legal aid, Criminal Legal Aid Reform accelerated measures and provider contracts. These statistics are derived from data held by LAA, produced and published by Legal Aid Statistics team of the Ministry of Justice (MOJ).

Data files the source for the key statistics on activity in the legal aid system for England and Wales in .csv (Comma delimited) format are published on Legal aid statistics: January to March 2025 data files (https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/legal-aid-statistics-january-to-march-2025-data-files).

Link to Data visualisation tools (https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/statistics/a-guide-to-legal-aid-statistics-in-england-and-wales/legal-aid-statistics-data-visualisation-tools), a web-based tools allowing the user to view and analyse charts and tables based on the published statistics.

Link to Legal aid management information (https://www.gov.uk/government/statistical-data-sets/legal-aid-management-information) to understand latest workload volumes and expenditure on Criminal legal aid reform and Trafficking and modern slavery are also published.

Statistician’s Comment

This publication shows that expenditure across both criminal and civil legal aid has increased year on year although over recent quarters we are seeing a levelling off of overall quarterly spend.

In the last few quarters, police station claim volumes have increased along with a corresponding increase in representation orders at the magistrates’ court. Expenditure in the police station and magistrates’ court increased in the latest quarter following this workload increase. At the Crown Court workload starts for sentencing fall while those completing over the last year have shown an increase.

Recently civil expenditure has been increasing, driven by a rise in family law expenditure, in this latest quarter though we have seen a slight fall reversing this trend. Other non-family workload has increased driven by immigration and housing work. Large increases in applications coming from the evidence attributed to domestic violence and child abuse have been seen over the last six months.

Annual figures released on diversity (of clients) show little change compared with last year in the types of clients based on their age, gender, ethnicity and disability. The volume of providers has also shown little change in either Crime or Civil legal aid over the previous year.

Pre-release

Pre-release access of up to 24 hours is granted to the following persons:

Ministry of Justice

Secretary of State for Justice, Parliamentary Under Secretary of State, Permanent Secretary, Head of Legal Aid Policy (2), Special Advisor Inbox, Legal Aid Policy Officials (9), Press Officers (4), Digital Officers (2), Private secretaries (5), Legal Aid Analysis (2)

Legal Aid Agency

Chief Executive, Chief Executive’s Office, Senior Commissioning Manager, Director of Finance Business Partnering, Service Development Managers (2), Exceptional and Complex Cases Workflow Co-ordinator, Change Manager