UK settles legal aid fee dispute with immigration lawyers

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The justice department has settled a case brought by top immigration lawyers about the failure to raise legal aid rates since 1996, in a sign of Sir Keir Starmer’s ambition to ease problems in the asylum system.

Shabana Mahmood, the Lord Chancellor and justice secretary, has agreed to make a decision on whether to raise fees for immigration and asylum legal aid work in November, drawing a close to a three-month dispute that started under the previous government.

She also committed to starting a consultation on any proposed increase in fees within eight weeks of her decision, leading the law firm to drop the case.

Duncan Lewis, one of the top immigration law firms in the UK, brought the case against the previous Conservative government earlier this year. It has argued that there would need to be an 18 per cent increase in legal aid fees in order for it to break even on this kind of work. 

The hourly rate for immigration legal aid has been stuck at £52 since 1996, meaning there has been a 48 per cent cut in pay for this work in real terms over the past 28 years.

“There’s a real urgency because people can’t get lawyers for their asylum claims now,” said Jeremy Bloom, a solicitor at Duncan Lewis.

Bloom added that the last Conservative administration positioned itself in opposition to “lefty lawyers” and had “no real interest in having a functional or sustainable legal aid system”.

By contrast Starmer’s Labour government had “seen the urgency” and prioritised making a decision, “which hopefully suggests that there is a shift in the value that they place on a functioning legal aid system and on migrants and asylum seekers having access to the legal representation to which they are entitled”.

Lord Richard Hermer, appointed attorney-general by Starmer in July, has worked on high profile immigration cases in the past.

Starmer has vowed to accelerate the processing of asylum claims over the next year, with the ambition of ending the use of hotels to house asylum seekers by the end of his first parliament.

The claim brought by Duncan Lewis, one of the largest publicly funded immigration and asylum practices in the UK, alleged that a mismatch in supply and demand of immigration legal aid was having “serious and potentially devastating implications” for access to justice for those who are entitled to legal support. 

Duncan Lewis has calculated an average annual loss to its law firm of £777,000 between 2020 and 2023 on immigration and asylum work, based on the costs to the firm of undertaking the work, including salaries and supervision of cases.

It also noted that in the four financial years between 2014 and 2018, the firm opened an average of about 4,000 asylum and migration cases per year, which dropped to just 800 in the year to August 2023.

According to Duncan Lewis’s analysis of Home Office data, there was a 160 per cent increase in the number of applications for asylum in England and Wales between 2019 and 2023, but only a 32 per cent increase in the number of asylum cases opened by legal aid providers. This growing gulf between supply and demand is one factor adding to the large backlog of asylum cases in the UK system, according to experts, as it slows the pace at which appeals of asylum claims are processed. 

The Ministry of Justice said: “The new government has inherited a justice system in crisis and we are committed to working with the legal profession to ensure the legal aid sector is on a sustainable footing, both now and in the future.

“We have conducted a review of the civil legal aid system and are carefully considering options for reform, including for immigration and asylum cases.”