England: Scathing report holds MoJ to account over dire legal aid situation

In a new report, Westminster’s Public Accounts Committee (PAC) has scrutinised the landscape for legal aid and HM Prison and Probation Service’s (HMPPS) decision to spend £4 million per year of taxpayers’ money on HMP Dartmoor - an empty prison that it cannot use, due to the detection of high levels of radon gas.

Large gaps in face-to-face legal provision still exist in some parts of the country, particularly for housing and debt advice. In 2024, the PAC expressed deep concern at the MoJ and Legal Aid Agency’s (LAA) lack of curiosity about what decreasing numbers of providers would do to people’s access to legal aid, despite evidence suggesting that access was getting harder. 

The committee is now still unconvinced that MoJ has done enough to ensure the future sustainability of the legal aid market. Some legal aid fees that have not increased since 1996 remain under review, while MoJ has committed to increasing some others without acting on this promise. Even with these commitments, the report highlights concerns within the sector that they will not be enough in the long-term.
 
The PAC is disappointed at the MoJ’s continued failure to make meaningful progress in better understanding the impact of its reforms, which removed access to most early legal advice over a decade ago. Research suggests this is leading to additional costs in the system. 

The report underlines the already-established risk of reliance on remote advice penalising digitally-excluded people - c.24 per cent of the population and often those most in need of legal assistance (e.g. disabled people or those living in poverty). Given this, the PAC is further disappointed that MoJ and LAA still cannot show an improved understanding of whether digitally excluded people are able to access help. Government must now lay out what it is doing to close gaps in provision where legal aid deserts still exist.
 
Following the cyber-attack on the LAA, the report finds that funding to address MoJ systems’ weaknesses is uncertain. The PAC is seeking clarity on whether it has sufficient resources to address key risks.
 
On HMP Dartmoor, the report finds that HMPPS made poor commercial decisions which resulted in a needless waste of taxpayers’ money. 

HMPPS’ reasoning for signing the £4m per year lease for an unusable prison was the urgent need for places due to the prison capacity crisis. The PAC does not accept this excuse. HMPPS signed a lease for the site despite knowing it suffered from high levels of radon two years prior, and without carrying out further comprehensive radon testing. It further failed to negotiate a corresponding reduction to the annual rent, safeguards to mitigate the financial risks of radon levels increasing, and under the contract terms is unable to terminate the lease until at least 2033. It also must pay additional improvement costs of £68m over this period.
 
Sir Geoffrey Clifton-Brown, chair of the Public Accounts Committee, said: “When I was elected as Public Accounts Committee Chair, I promised to follow up on areas of weakness identified through our scrutiny where government continues not to live up to taxpayers’ expectations. We are therefore returning with our first report of 2026 to the Ministry of Justice (MoJ) and HM Prison and Probation Service (HMPPS).
 
“The criminal justice system remains in crisis, end to end. These are areas well-covered in other PAC inquiries, but this report covers two areas overseen by MoJ which demand both our particularly close attention, and that of the wider public. On legal aid, the reforms of a decade ago are now at serious risk of going down in history as an extinction event for the entitlement to access to legal advice in large parts of the country.

“Our report finds government remaining stubbornly uninterested in whether this is the case, but it must now wake up on this subject. If it refuses to, the Ministry of Justice should, frankly, consider changing its name to the Ministry of Justice (for Certain People). This might be more appropriate for a nation without a sustainable solution in the long-term to provide legal aid to the digitally-excluded quarter of the population who need it most.”