Question to the Ministry of Justice:

To ask the Secretary of State for Justice, what proportion of applications for exceptional case funding were granted legal aid in every year since 2010.

Prior to 2013, when a case fell outside the usual remit of Community Legal Service funding, an individual could make an application to the Legal Services Commission for exceptional funding under s6(8) of the Access to Justice Act 1999. These cases included disputes, inquests and tribunal hearings. Depending on the type of case, funding could either be granted by the LSC, or by Ministers. The figures below reflect the percentage of cases granted exceptional funding under the provisions of the Access to Justice Act 1999, based on the date they were received by the LSC. Please note these figures have been extracted from raw data held on an operational database, which like any operational database, may contain errors. The data is not maintained to the standard of Official Statistics and has not been subject to any validation methods, and therefore should be interpreted as such.

*includes applications received in April 2013 under transitionary provisions.

The Legal Aid, Sentencing and Punishment of Offenders Act 2012 (LASPO) superseded the Access to Justice Act 1999 in April 2013 and introduced a new Exceptional Case Funding (ECF) scheme to provide funding where a lack of representation would otherwise risk a breach of an individual’s EU or Convention rights. Information for this scheme is shown below: