Question to the Ministry of Justice:

To ask the Secretary of State for Justice, what the total amount of spending commitments was that his Department made in its post-implementation LASPO review.

Alongside the post-implementation review of the Legal Aid, Sentencing and Punishment of Offenders Act (LASPO), we published the Legal Support Action Plan which outlines the steps the Government will be taking over the next two years to enhance the breadth of support to people experiencing legal problems.

We are funding a number of changes to legal aid, including; improving the exceptional case funding scheme, removing the mandatory element of the CLA telephone gateway and expanding the scope of legal aid to include Special Guardianship Orders in private family law.

Alongside this, we are delivering £5m in innovation funding to drive change across the sector and doubling our funding to support litigants in person to £3m for each of the next two years. We will be funding a series of pilots to build a robust evidence base, testing methods of delivering support to make sure that people can access the right type of support at the right time, in the right way for them.

The outcomes and evidence base that we will build up through the projects announced in the Legal Support Action Plan will inform future decisions on how we deliver that support.