Ministry of Justice officials have acknowledged they ‘failed fast’ with an early legal advice pilot that practitioners warned at the time was a lost opportunity to demonstrate the positive impact of legal aid.

Nearly four years after the government committed to piloting early advice in social welfare law, a six-month scheme finally began in October 2022. Ministers later revealed that 27,000 invitations were sent to residents in Middlesbrough and Manchester identified as having ‘early stage’ housing-related debt, but only 104 people applied to participate, and three Middlesbrough residents requested and attended a free advice session.

Jerome Glass, director general for the ministry’s policy and strategy group, told the House of Commons public accounts committee yesterday: ‘We’ve learned a lot from it. We failed fast in the sense we stopped when we saw it wasn’t getting the take-up and we then used that learning to design the next thing that we are doing, which is the early family legal advice.’

‘Better engagement’ was one of two lessons the ministry learnt from the failed pilot. ‘I think we were a little bit top-down and so we’re going to do that better – rather than write letters to people, work with the providers [who] know their clients.’

The second lesson: better communications and advertising. ‘One of the issues we’ve been finding as we’ve been doing the review of civil legal aid is people do not know they are eligible and they think legal aid is for crime and are not aware that legal aid is available in lots of civil cases as well. That’s something we’ve really got to work on,’ Glass said.

When the pilot began, Legal Aid Practitioners Group chief executive Chris Minnoch warned that a three-hour advice cap would limit the ability of providers to give the type of help clients needed and limit the data being collected.

Central England Law Centre said clients would be worried or suspicious about receiving a letter from the council. The pilot was amended to enable direct referrals from legal aid providers. However, the Law Society said the changes came too late in the process and had little impact.