36 Public and Human Rights (’36P&HR’) welcomes news from the Government (accessible here) of the first increase in fee rates for housing and immigration legal aid work since 1996, with overall increases of approximately 24% for housing work and 30% for immigration. This follows the Ministry of Justice consultation ‘Civil legal aid: Towards a sustainable future’.
36P&HR responded to the consultation on 21 March 2025. In our response (accessible here [LINK]) we stated ‘We believe that substantial correction of the path is necessary, for there to be sufficient value and security in publicly funded work for new practitioners to enter and established practitioners to take more publicly funded work. We hope that the proposals elsewhere in the consultation, some of which we address, allow this to happen.’ We also emphasised the potential positive role of adequately funded legal aid system in aiding effective and credible government, promoting both expedition and fairness, by for instance providing means to address backlogs of appeals and other proceedings both in housing and in immigration.
This is the valuable first step towards rebuilding legal aid for advice and representation in civil justice proceedings, which has been in crisis, with fewer and fewer lawyers providing legal aid services in these areas.
Further information
For more information from the public-law team, contact clerks@36public.co.uk
Involving Eric Fripp
