Research commissioned by the Access to Justice Foundation in partnership with the Bar Council has found that providing free specialist legal advice could save the government £4.5 billion for every 500,000 people who receive it.

The Value of Justice for All estimates that where a person is in need of specialist advice but does not receive it, the Treasury incurs an average cost of £12,400 in the first year, compared to £3,300 when free legal advice is provided.

According to the report, in 2023 the provision of free specialist legal advice saved the Treasury approximately £9,100 per case – meaning that for every £1 the Treasury spent on legal advice and its outcomes, it saved the public purse £2.71, a nearly threefold saving on investment.

The research draws on interviews with more than 20 specialist legal advice providers and data from 54 organisations that assisted more than 129,000 people last year.  

Chair of the Bar Sam Townend KC said: ‘The report makes plain how a properly funded free legal advice sector would make a huge difference to the hundreds of thousands of people behind each case, those working in the system and the public purse.’

Increasing demand

Free early legal advice can help with issues including debt, health and social care, housing, employment rights and domestic abuse. The repercussions of the pandemic and cost-of-living crisis mean that more people are facing personal and financial crises with the report finding that the average person needing help is dealing with five different legal problems at once.

Norfolk Community Law Service (NCLS) CEO David Powles said the number of people NCLS helps has ‘massively increased’, up by 38% since 2021/22. ‘We could double or quadruple in size and the demand would still be there – one thing we’re never short of is demand,’ he explained. ‘In Norfolk, we’ve seen legal aid practitioners reduce constantly, so we're picking up that that tab as well – a lot of the options that are open to people have just been reduced so they're increasingly ending up on our doorstep.’

Civil legal aid provision is now £728 million lower in real terms compared to a decade ago and lawyers’ fees are now half what they were in 1996. The free legal advice providers surveyed receive funding from multiple sources – just 8% of their funding came from legal aid. All told researchers that the funding gap was a major concern with one advice provider estimating that they had a deficit of between £120,000 and £250,000.

The current legal aid means test makes access to legal services unaffordable. Research commissioned by the Law Society found that a single person will not be eligible for legal aid unless they earn less than £9 a day or £268 a month – 81% below the minimum income threshold.

Many in crisis

Not only are people needing help with more than one issue, but their problems are now more acute. Debt levels have significantly worsened since the pandemic. The report found that 32,000 debt relief orders were issued in 2023, an increase from 20,000 in 2021. NCLS’s average client is £14,149 in debt, a marked increase from £4,429 in 2019/20.

Access Social Care (ASC) is an organisation providing free legal advice and information for those with social care needs and helps them achieve a better quality of life. Its State of the Nation report – which combines data from national helplines – has found a 222% increase in social care advice demand post pandemic with specialist legal requests increasing by 206%.

CEO and founder of ASC Kari Gerstheimer said: ‘People have always presented in this space with multiple issues, but now we're seeing multiple issues in crisis… It's just becoming more and more horrific for people, because we see that people are quite literally having to choose between food, heating their home and social care.’

This comes at a cost to those working in the sector too. Powles added ‘there's never an end to the people that they can help and then you've got the vicarious trauma from hearing situations that sadly are getting worse and worse’.

The research found a shift in the economic status of those accessing services with a notable increase in people who previously would have paid for legal services now unable to – 37% of people using free legal advice were in work and 12% were homeowners. ‘There's no denying that the demographics of the people who we help are changing,’ Powles explained. ‘More and more people have been squeezed and feel that paying for legal advice is a luxury.’

Justice can be the solution

Receiving free legal advice can have a positive domino effect. People accessing free specialist legal advice benefit from higher employment rates, improved health and wellbeing, and reduced reliance on benefits. Researchers found that getting free legal advice to 100,000 people could lead to 38,900 more entering the workforce, generating approximately £81 million in income tax and National Insurance contributions.

Gerstheimer continued: ‘Obviously, everybody's fighting for money. Often justice falls to the bottom of the pile, but there needs to be greater recognition that justice can be the solution to some of those funding problems elsewhere, whether it’s prisons or health.

‘What we see all the time is if you don't meet a legal need early on, that cost doesn't go away, it just goes somewhere else… Somebody hasn't had support, and the needs of that individual escalate. Frequently, if people with a learning disability or with complex needs don't have their needs met by social care, they end up in A&E or in the criminal justice system. It is horrifying and costs so much money.’

Just over half of those needing free legal advice in 2023 had a long-standing illness or a disability. At ASC, they try to bring about change through policy. ‘There's the wider impact of if you do casework well, it can identify where there are systemic problems,’ Gerstheimer explained.

ASC recently helped a young man in supported accommodation get back his access to transport which had been taken away by the local authority, ‘hugely’ impacting him and his mental health. As a result of the ASC’s work, the local authority changed their policy so that thousands of others did not have to go through the same.

‘That's the way that we like to work – with public bodies rather than against them,’ Gerstheimer added. ‘Whether you're a public body or a public lawyer, we're all in it for the same reason: for people’s rights to be met.’  

Fresh approach needed

The Bar Council, together with the Access to Justice Foundation, continues to urge the government to take a fresh approach to free legal advice and recognise that it is an area where public money can be spent to save.

The Bar Council’s submission to the Spending Review urged the Treasury to include restoring legal aid for early legal advice in order to improve access to justice and save on costs. 

The Value of Justice for All research, commissioned by the Access to Justice Foundation in partnership with the Bar Council, was carried out by Rebecca Munro and Lorna Preece of Pragmatix Advisory Ltd. Read the full report here.