Question to the Ministry of Justice:

To ask the Secretary of State for Justice, what is the (a) annual cost to the public purse for the Legal Aid Agency to process applications for exceptional case funding and (b) value of exceptional case funding claims that have been (i) granted and (ii) denied in the each of the last three years.

The information requested is not held centrally.

The unit cost of processing an application is not specifically tracked or recorded by the Legal Aid Agency (LAA), nor is the administrative spend on Exceptional Case Funding (ECF) recorded separately to general legal aid administrative spend. Details about volumes of ECF applications, broken down by category, for every year since 2013 can be found in legal aid statistics published by the Ministry of Justice [see tables 8.1 and 8.2]: https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/legal-aid-statistics-april-to-june-2023

Legal Aid Expenditure is tracked by the form of service it is provided under i.e. whether it is advice and assistance provided under Legal Help or Controlled Legal Representation or representation in proceedings provided as Civil Representation. ECF can be provided under either form of service. These costs are paid via a number of different billing platforms, not all of which have the functionality to isolate ECF costs from other civil costs. It is therefore not possible to disaggregate the value of ECF cases from the value of other civil in-scope cases. Expenditure under the ECF scheme therefore forms part of the overall civil legal aid expenditure as detailed in tables 5.3 and 6.5 of the published legal aid statistics https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/legal-aid-statistics-april-to-june-2023.

The LAA would not hold any information regarding the value of claims where it has refused an application for funding under ECF. The value of the claim would only be apparent at the conclusion of the case after a bill was submitted to the Legal Aid Agency. If legal aid under ECF is not granted, no bill is submitted.