Question to the Ministry of Justice:

To ask the Secretary of State for Justice, how many and what proportion of applications for legal aid in family proceedings have been granted to mothers in each of the last five years.

The Legal Aid Agency does not specifically track or report on grants of legal aid broken down by whether the applicant was a mother or father as the same eligibility criteria are applicable to all parents and persons with parental responsibility. The requested information could only be obtained by manually reviewing individual applications at disproportionate cost to the Department.