Legal Profession: Legal Aid Scheme

(asked on 1st June 2020) - View Source

Question to the Ministry of Justice:

To ask the Secretary of State for Justice, how many new law firms have obtained a criminal legal aid contract in each year since 2010.


Answered by
Alex Chalk Portrait
Alex Chalk
Lord Chancellor and Secretary of State for Justice
This question was answered on 9th June 2020

Expenditure on police station advice is published as part of Legal Aid Agency’s Quarterly Statistics. This data can be viewed by accessing Column ‘L’ of the table 2.2 at this link:

https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/legal-aid-statistics-quarterly-october-to-december-2019

The number of claims received by the Legal Aid agency for police station attendances is also published in the Legal Aid Agency’s Quarterly Statistics at table 2.1, please note that the number of claims for ‘attendances’ can be found at Column C. These are a specific subset of total claims for all types of police station advice which can be found at Column L of the same table

This information is not held by the Ministry of Justice because the Legal Aid Agency does not record this type of information about Legal Aid Providers.

Please note for the figures provided that some firms may have more than 1 office. There are currently 1,147 firms holding a criminal legal aid contract, and this equates to 1,697 offices. This data is correct at 3rd June 2020.

2009/10

2010/11

2011/12

2012/13

2013/14

2014/15

2015/16

2016/17

2017/18

2018/19

2019/20

2021/21 (at June 20)

New Firms

12

165

1

6

8

5

87

5

115

5

3

0

New Offices

14

187

1

6

8

8

87

5

131

6

4

0

Please note ‘New firms’ may be the result of mergers and acquisitions outside of the tender process. Firms may have withdrawn and then re-entered into new contract later. This data has been provided on yearly basis as the data is too granular to provide month on month changes - the year end position has been shown for active firms/offices. There were formal tenders in 2010 and 2017, hence the larger numbers. In 2015/16 after the competitive tender was set aside new firms that had been successful in their bid for an own client contract were allowed to deliver services. The data is correct at 3rd June 2020.

As at 1 June 2020 we have 4455 duty solicitors listed on our database allocated slots for the current rota period. The LAA publishes the duty solicitor rotas here:

https://www.gov.uk/guidance/duty-solicitors-rotas-information-and-guidance#duty-solicitor-rotas-1st-april-2020-to-september-30-2020---first-publication

There are 2063 reps which includes probationary and accredited on the current list and it is published here:

https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/standard-crime-contract-2017

We are aware that the Covid19 restrictions have had an impact on the volume of work conducted by Legal Aid providers. The LAA have been in contact with providers to assess the impact on their businesses. Many have reported taking advantage of the schemes made available by HMT and we continue to monitor the situation closely.

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