Legal Aid Scheme

(asked on 26th November 2021) - View Source

Question to the Ministry of Justice:

To ask the Secretary of State for Justice, what the (a) total and (b) per application cost to the public purse of processing exceptional case funding applications across all areas of law that are out of scope for legal aid has been in (i) cash and (ii) real terms in England and Wales in each year since 2012.


Answered by
James Cartlidge Portrait
James Cartlidge
Minister of State (Ministry of Defence)
This question was answered on 6th December 2021

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, 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: https://www.gov.uk/government/collections/legal-aid-statistics (available up to and including June 2021).

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