Question to the Ministry of Justice:

To ask the Secretary of State for Justice, what assessment he has made of the impact of extending fixed recoverable costs on the legal aid sector.

Last year, the Government spent around £1.7bn on legal aid. We are also injecting more than £10 million of increased funding a year into housing legal aid through our reforms to the Housing Possession Court Duty Scheme. We keep the impact of the extension of fixed recoverable costs on legal aid under close review and have temporarily paused the extension to legally aided housing possession cases, to allow time for improvements to provision to be implemented.