The government will press ahead with plans to remodel its emergency legal aid scheme for tenants facing eviction – with significant alterations to address practitioners' concerns about delivery and sustainability. In a further, significant development, it has decided to delay extending fixed recoverable costs to legally aided housing possession cases.

The existing housing possession court duty scheme, which provides on-the-day advice and advocacy at court to people facing eviction, will be remodelled to become a housing loss prevention advice service that will also offer early legal advice before court.

The ministry has modified its proposals so that HLPAS providers can offer early legal advice on social welfare law matters when tenants receive notice of possession from the landlord, mortgager or creditor.

Acknowledging that not all providers will be equally positioned to deliver the wider service, a contracted panel of legal experts will be established to ‘assist and upskill’ providers where they need further support. This will be modelled on the specialist support contracts which used to be tendered by the Legal Services Commission. 

Grant funding for legal aid training contracts will be piloted. If the pilot is successful in attracting new people to the legal aid sector, funding will be extended across civil legal aid.

The £157 fixed fee to provide early legal advice will remain. However, an escape threshold set at three times the value of the fixed fee will be introduced to ensure complex cases do not become unattractive to providers. Court attendance fees will remain the equivalent of a provider seeing two clients, despite the Law Society saying it should be higher.

After practitioners raised concern that extending fixed recoverable costs to housing cases would make it difficult for providers to deliver free legal advice, the ministry has decided to delay the controversial measure by two years.

Justice minister James Cartlidge said: ‘We don’t want anyone to go through the devastating experience of losing their home, which is why we have overhauled the legal aid scheme to ensure anyone that needs it has earlier access to free legal advice.

‘During such a stressful and uncertain period in people’s lives, our raft of reforms will also provide wider, wraparound care to support individuals and families on money and welfare issues.’

Simon Mullings, co-chair of the Housing Law Practitioners Association, welcomed the proposals. ‘While I still continue to advocate for “crisis navigator” support at court and elsewhere, I believe that the HLPAS proposals, if implemented in the right way and aligned to further work by government to shore up the viability of housing providers, can be a significant step towards effective early legal advice,’ he added.

The new contracts will begin in April 2023 and the procurement process will begin later this year.