Justice Under Austerity: Evidence from Legal Aid in England and Wales

• In Event: Civil Legal Assistance as a Health Intervention: Evidence, Access, and Measurement

Abstract

In 2013, England and Wales implemented a legal aid reform that sharply reduced public funding for civil legal assistance, eliminating early-stage support and restricting aid to last-resort courtroom interventions. This paper examines the broader socioeconomic and public health consequences of this retrenchment, focusing on vulnerable households facing housing, debt, and welfare disputes. Using panel data from 2009 to 2023 on legal aid provider locations, service volumes, court filings, and mortality, we quantify the reform's effects on access to justice and downstream outcomes. Our empirical strategy combines a difference-in-differences design exploiting spatial and temporal variation in access driven by provider closures with a Bartik-style instrument based on pre-reform exposure to funding cuts. Areas more exposed to the reform experienced significant increases in eviction filings and court orders, alongside rises in homelessness and mortality, with effects compounded in areas simultaneously hit by welfare benefit cuts. By defunding early advice and narrowing legal aid to specific practice areas, the reform undermined providers' ability to address interconnected problems, rendering the integrated service model financially unviable. Providers delivering early intervention, cross-domain casework, and court representation within a single organisation exited disproportionately, severing the link between upstream problem-solving and court-stage protection. Early advice and court-stage representation appear as complements, not substitutes: preserving one without the other left the most vulnerable households worse off across multiple dimensions.

The presentation additionally draws on a companion study that provides direct evidence on the channels connecting legal assistance to these outcomes. Using linked administrative benefits data and a mixed-methods design combining a survey of former clients from a law centre with qualitative interviews, the companion study tracks welfare trajectories of households receiving legal assistance from a provider that maintained the full pre-reform pipeline through charitable funding. Treated households experienced significant increases in benefit income relative to matched controls, with gains accumulating over 18 to 24 months. The study traces three channels through which legal assistance operates: crisis management during displacement, gradual income maximisation through identification of unclaimed entitlements, and tenancy preservation. Nearly half of surveyed clients reported receiving help accessing benefits or financial assistance, over a third were connected to health or mental health services, and more than half received support beyond their presenting legal issue. Qualitative evidence reveals that the most consistently reported impact was an immediate reduction in psychological distress at the point of first contact, often well before the legal case was resolved.

Together, these findings highlight the role of access to justice in social protection and suggest that cutting preventive legal services shifts costs onto local authorities and healthcare systems. They contribute to a growing body of evidence on the welfare and health consequences of civil legal aid provision. The findings carry implications for the design of publicly funded legal assistance programs, including the right to counsel initiatives expanding across U.S. jurisdictions.

Author

• Juliet-Nil Uraz, London School of Economics and Political Science
  Presenting Author