A council and law centre went ‘one step beyond’ in sharing data, providing hard evidence that legal assistance works and should be properly funded. Doing nothing is costly
What happens to people after they receive legal help? A groundbreaking study unveiled at the Law Centres Conference this week answers that question with hard and data-led evidence.
To fully appreciate the landmark research, we must go back to 2024. Ministry of Justice officials then acknowledged that they ‘failed fast’ with an early legal advice pilot that practitioners lamented was a lost opportunity to demonstrate the positive impact of legal aid.
The government committed to the pilot in its 2019 Legal Support Action Plan. Some 27,000 invitations were sent to residents in Middlesbrough and Manchester identified as having ‘early stage’ housing-related debt. Only 104 people applied to participate, and just three Middlesbrough residents requested and attended a free advice session.
What lessons did officials learn? ‘Better engagement,’ a senior official told the Commons public accounts committee. The department acknowledged it was ‘a little bit top-down’. Rather than write letters to people, it needed to work with providers ‘who know their clients’.
But where the MoJ failed, social welfare software and analytics business Policy in Practice, the Legal Education Foundation, Central England Law Centre and Coventry City Council have succeeded.
Over 24 months, their project tracked 110 households that received legal help, comparing them with similar low-income households that did not.
The headline findings are unsurprising. Legal help made households better off and the gains lasted. The ‘equivalised’ income for law'
'I’m forever grateful... It means a lot, when you know someone’s actually helping, when you’re struggling like this, it makes such a difference to your mental health'
Law centre client
What make this study particularly impressive are the methodology and collaboration. The report explains that there was no established template for linking legal assistance data with local authority data. A governance framework had to be built from scratch. This required a data protection impact assessment, identification of legal bases for processing, and bilateral agreements between the council, law centre and trusted intermediary.
The law centre’s input led to the project being reframed as an exploration of the potential of administrative benefits data to capture the broader, multidimensional effects of legal assistance, rather than just being an impact evaluation. Policy in Practice securely matched the law centre’s data to the council’s housing benefit, council tax reduction and Universal Credit data.
A carefully crafted client survey and in-depth interviews reached beyond what the data could ‘see’. One client in a housing possession case described the law centre’s help as ‘light at the end of the tunnel’. Another said: ‘I’m forever grateful... It means a lot, when you know someone’s actually helping, when you’re struggling like this, it makes such a difference to your mental health.’
Juliet-Nil Uraz, the project’s principal investigator, told the Gazette that the study highlights the value of collaboration. It helped that Central England Law Centre and Coventry City Council have worked together for 50 years. There was no competitive interest but a desire to help the same population as much as possible, as early as possible. Uraz praised the council and law centre for ‘going one step beyond’ in sharing data.
The full methodology, including challenges and limitations, as well as the lessons to be learned, is laid out in the 253-page report. This effectively amounts to a blueprint for what could be achieved if the project were scaled up to cover more advice providers, local authorities and areas of law.
The model can be easily replicated, as proven by the partnership between Coventry City Council and Central England Law Centre. The project originally began in 2019 with a London council and law centre, but that partnership was abandoned after the council issued a section 114 (bankruptcy) notice.
With Treasury money difficult to secure, it is also worth noting that the project was delivered for less than 5% of the cost of the government’s early legal advice pilot.
The report concludes with policy recommendations to strengthen the delivery of legal assistance and the evidence base for it.
The first, and arguably most important, point is that legal assistance works and needs to be properly funded. Doing nothing is costly. Three in 10 enquiries handled by Central England Law Centre during the observation window concerned evictions. Temporary accommodation typically costs local authorities £20,000 per family.
The MoJ has admitted its ‘top-down’ approach was wrong. ‘This project demonstrates that building the evidence base from the bottom up is feasible and worthwhile.’
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