England and Wales has ‘one of the highest per capita spends in the world’ on legal aid, the Ministry of Justice said this week. Well there’s no surprise there; that little snippet is regularly trotted out by the government when it is responding to Gazette reports on legal aid cuts. We might be cutting funding to what you consider to be essential areas of advice, but we’re not as bad as all those nasty other countries, is the argument.

Well if this week’s press release is anything to go by, it will not be the last time the government intends to use this line. It turns out that, despite already seeming to know all about how little other countries spend on their legal aid budgets, the MoJ has funded some independent research on the subject. The Centre for Criminal Justice Economics and Psychology has found – as we already knew – that England and Wales spends more than France, the Netherlands, Germany, Sweden, Australia, Canada and New Zealand on legal aid. This is, it says, because of ‘higher case volumes’ (hard to see how the government can blame lawyers for that one) and higher average costs per case (that must be where the money-grabbing solicitors come in).

Indeed, the MoJ press release says ‘the report shows that in 2004 [not exactly recent, mind] the cost of legal aid in England and Wales was more than double that of the Netherlands and ten times that of France’.

With all this talk of spending on legal aid, I had a question of my own to put to the MoJ. Just precisely how much did it spend on commissioning this research? The answer: £24,000. Is that more or less than other countries would spend on finding out something they already knew, I wonder?