Question to the Ministry of Justice:

To ask the Secretary of State for Justice, how many of the calls received by the Mandatory Civil Legal Advice Gateway in each year since 2013 have been referred for face-to-face advice, for each category of advice.

Figures are provided for the full financial years of 2013/14, 2014/15, 2015/16 and 2016/17 with data given for each of the Civil Legal Advice Mandatory Gateway categories of Debt, Discrimination and Education.

The Legal Aid Agency (LAA) does not hold data on the number of calls received per category but does record the number of cases per category; a case can have more than one call. This information is shown below. In the table below the number of CLA Operator Service cases is the total number of enquiries irrespective of whether the client is eligible for legal aid or not; the number of cases referred to CLA Specialists is the number of cases identified at initial diagnosis where the client is eligible for legal aid.

The table below shows the number of clients in each of the categories who either received face-to-face advice via Civil Legal Advice (CLA) or who were referred to legal aid face-to-face advice providers.

Please note that in the category of Debt a Civil Legal Advice Provider will make a referral to a suitable Legal Aid Provider if they identify a client as needing face-to-face advice. In the categories of Discrimination and Education the CLA Specialists are contracted by the Legal Aid Agency to also provide Face-to-Face advice when needed.