Legal aid statistics quarterly: January to March 2026
Activity in the legal aid system for England and Wales, including criminal and civil legal aid, family mediation, providers of legal aid and central funds payments.
Applies to England and Wales
Documents
Details
Legal aid statistics publication presents statistics on the legal aid scheme administered by the Legal Aid Agency (LAA) for England and Wales. This edition comprises the first release of statistics for the three month period from January to March 2026 and also provides the latest statement of figures for all earlier periods. This edition also includes figures on central funds, providers of legal aid, inquests, the diversity of clients receiving legal aid and provider contracts. These statistics are derived from data held by LAA, produced and published by Legal Aid Statistics team of the Ministry of Justice (MOJ).
Data files the source for the key statistics on activity in the legal aid system for England and Wales in .csv (Comma delimited) format are published on Legal aid statistics: January to March 2026 data files.
Link to Data visualisation tools, a web-based tools allowing the user to view and analyse charts and tables based on the published statistics.
Statistician’s Comment
Given that all completion data for every scheme (except criminal high cost claims) is now being released, we have not published the contingency payments management information for this quarter.
While figures have been released for civil representation, the system backlog and restart date in December 2025 does mean that data in this area shows a large spike in starts, grants and completions. It is anticipated that this backlog and temporary increase in workload and expenditure will return nearer to normality within a few quarters.
At the Crown Court, the relatively unchanged workload during the period of contingency following the cyber-attack has shown the prioritisation of these claims and payments made. After the initial fall in the first two quarters of 2025, payments are recovering and the shortfall for the third quarter and most recent quarters shows a scheme that has returned to its initial state, with small falls seen in both fee schemes only.
Figures covering legal help, mediation and crime lower are provided for the first time since the annual release last year. These figures are from the new data collection system and also include data submitted from the months during the cyber-attack impact. Figures are broadly in line with the previous year across all three schemes.
Annual figures released on diversity of clients show little change compared with last year in the types of clients based on their age, gender, ethnicity and disability. The volume of providers has also shown little change in Crime over the previous year. A fall in civil providers is not unexpected with the lack of completions in the first two quarters and the backlog seen in civil representation.
Pre-release
Pre-release access of up to 24 hours is granted to the following persons:
Ministry of Justice
Secretary of State for Justice, Parliamentary Under Secretary of State, Permanent Secretary, Second Permanent Secretary, Head of Legal Aid Policy (2), Special Advisor Inbox, Legal Aid Policy Officials (7), Press Officers (4), Digital Officers (2), Private secretaries (5), Legal Aid Analysis
Legal Aid Agency
Chief Executive, Chief Executive’s Office, Senior Commissioning Manager, Director of Finance Business Partnering, Service Development Managers (2), Exceptional and Complex Cases Workflow Co-ordinator, Change Manager