The Legal Aid Agency wasted nearly £400,000 processing – and in most cases approving - immigration applications under the exceptional funding scheme as a direct result of reforms that were supposed to deliver taxpayers better value for money, according to a new report.

The Legal Aid, Sentencing and Punishment of Offenders Act significantly narrowed the scope of public funding for immigration. Applications for cases that fell out of scope have to be made through the exceptional funding scheme, which has been criticised for being complex and bureaucratic.

With the help of publicly available data, a briefing paper from the University of Exeter, Migrants Organise and Public Law Project suggests the cuts have cost the Ministry of Justice more money than they saved.

The Legal Aid Agency told the public accounts committee that the cost of processing each ECF application was £203 – six times higher than a standard application (£34).

The overall cost, therefore, of processing the 2,265 immigration ECF applications in 2022/2023 was £459,795. Had the scope of immigration legal aid not been narrowed, the LAA would have spent £77,010 instead.

The report lists several pieces of missing data needed to understand the full cost of legal aid cuts. For instance, data is not collected on how much local authorities must spend on financial support and temporary accommodation for people with no recourse to public funds. Data is not collected on the number of hospital discharges delayed due to immigration status.

PLP senior researcher Dr Jo Hynes said: ‘Are cuts costing more money than they saved, and could we in fact have a fairer and more efficient system by spending money in different ways? This report clearly spells out which data the incoming government needs to keep track of in order to find that out… By collecting the data points we identify, the government will be able to start building immigration legal aid policy on a sound evidence base.’

 

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