Legal aid statistics quarterly: October to December 2025
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
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Statistician’s comment
This publication, the first since June 2025, provides figures across legal aid schemes where available. In areas that currently have no available claim data there is a new management information release showing the contingency payments provided under each scheme. These vary with an average payment system instituted for civil representation payments and for schemes using the claim bulk upload method (crime lower, legal help and mediation) the payments, based on locally recorded data, provided for each month between June 2025 and January 2026.
Comparisons have been made between the closed claim total expenditure usually released and these payments. This shows that across all schemes the total payments are of the same magnitude but while similar it is not possible to further breakdown payments information. The two numbers are not strictly comparable and so caution should be taken in interpretation of these numbers.
At the Crown Court the relatively unchanged workload during the period of contingency has shown the prioritisation of these claims and payments made for each. After the initial fall in the first quarter, a recovery in the second quarter with payments covering the shortfall seen the final quarter shows a scheme that has returned to its initial state with slight falls seen in both fee schemes only.
Due to unavailability of systems within civil representation figures have not been given in this release. Actual claims have been entered from December 2025 onwards only and this can be seen with much reduced volumes for applications and grants in this area for quarter one and two of 2025/26 with a large influx in the latest quarter. As time progresses more recoupments will be made from the average payments setup and billing data used. As this occurs the statistics will place these payments in the time period when the work was completed with a rising set of expenditure figures between April and December 2025 in subsequent publications.
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, Head of Legal Aid Policy (2), Special Advisor Inbox, Legal Aid Policy Officials (9), 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