Following the abolition of legal aid for most civil cases, law centres had to change their operating models to survive. Catherine Baksi reports on the challenges centres face – and their resilience – at a time of unprecedented need
The low down
Law centres help thousands of people struggling with legal problems that can verge on existential. Their support saves public money and reduces the poverty gap, but this is barely acknowledged in public policy. Legal aid reforms and funding cuts have pushed some centres to the brink. Many struggle to recruit. Yet the sector ‘refuses to give up’. It is transforming its delivery models to form strategic partnerships with community groups and exploring ways to use artificial intelligence to provide access to justice. And now, for the first time, a groundbreaking report has calculated the economic value of the work that law centres do. Will that help the sector make a compelling case for better support?
Since the North Kensington Law Centre opened its doors in 1970, law centres have been a vital source of legal advice, helping thousands of people assert their rights, fight eviction and take control of their debts. Demand has soared since the Legal Aid, Sentencing and Punishment of Offenders Act 2012 (LASPO) cut large areas of civil legal aid in England and Wales. The act removed public funding for most family, housing, employment and debt disputes. This increased the need for law centres while also removing a major source of their income.
Anecdotally, the value of what law centres do is obvious. They help people address their legal problems and prevent matters from escalating into a crisis. With the right assistance and support, people stay in their homes, manage their debts and assert their rights. In the process, there is a consequential saving for taxpayers.
Finding proof
We now have hard proof of their value. A four-year study published last month provides the first statistical evidence of what happens to people’s lives when they receive legal assistance from law centres.
The research was conducted by social policy analytics company Policy in Practice for the Legal Education Foundation, in partnership with the Central England Law Centre and Coventry City Council. It linked the case data of a law centre to local authority benefits data, tracking 110 matched households over 24 months and comparing them with similar low-income households who did not receive legal help.
The study was delivered for under 5% of the cost of the government’s own Early Legal Advice Pilot, a £5m randomised trial that collapsed in 2023 after just five people used the service. It found that legal assistance raises income, reduces poverty and may cut costs elsewhere in the public sector. People who received legal help saw their household incomes rise by £135 a month and there was a £50 monthly reduction in the poverty gap.
By preventing housing problems from escalating and leading to eviction, legal assistance kept people in their homes and, for around one in five clients, was the decisive factor in securing benefits they would not otherwise have received.
The impact was not only financial – getting legal advice had a marked impact on mental health. More than half of the clients reported anxiety, stress or depression before making contact, and two-thirds linked that distress directly to their legal problem. Among those who received intensive help, 72.5% felt better afterwards, reporting a marked easing of anxiety and distress that began on the first contact.
‘For decades we’ve known legal advice changes lives. Now we can prove it,’ says Deven Ghelani, founder and chief executive of Policy in Practice.
‘Legal assistance should be treated as part of an anti-poverty response, in both policy and practice,’ insists the principal investigator, Juliet-Nil Uraz. She wants to see public bodies make better use of linked administrative data, not just to evaluate services but to spot people who need legal support before problems escalate. She urges better collaboration between local authorities and advice providers.
The authors have presented their findings to the Ministry of Justice. They have urged officials to support data-sharing between advice providers, local authorities and ministries (including the Department for Work and Pensions), and to replicate the study across more places and areas of law.
More widely, and recognising that many housing problems stem from missing benefits or wrongful decisions, the report’s authors want to see income maximisation embedded into legal support. This would stabilise households earlier, identifying unmet need and highlighting the need for intervention to prevent costs shifting to homelessness, health and welfare services.
‘Law centres are already highly effective, often as the last source of specialist social welfare law in their area,’ says Uraz. But she stresses that they could be more effective if they had: stable core funding rather than short-term project money; stronger data partnerships with local authorities; more systematic income maximisation within legal casework; and the flexibility to respond holistically to people’s problems.
Social infrastructure
Nimrod Ben-Cnaan, the Law Centres Network’s (LCN) head of policy and profile, says: ‘A government serious about prevention and justice should see law centres as core social infrastructure. Helping people enforce their rights should be integral to a government that seeks to fix the fundamentals and restore public trust.’
Rooted in the heart of local communities, law centres ‘use the law to help people secure the essentials of a stable life of dignity – a home, a livelihood, support for those who need it’, he explains. ‘We seek to help the whole person, not simply run a case.’
Open and shut
There are currently 43 law centres in England, Wales and Northern Ireland, up from 29 in 2015. LCN figures show that they constitute 3% of all civil legal aid providers, over a third of welfare benefits legal aid providers, 15% of housing providers and nearly a quarter of housing duty desks.
However, LCN director Julie Bishop stresses that the number of law centres ‘has never told the full story’. She adds: ‘Behind every figure is a decade of fighting against a legal aid system that pays less in real terms than it did in 1996, against a funding landscape that has made sustainability feel impossible for organisations that exist precisely because they refuse to walk away from their communities.’
While some law centres have closed, on average, a new one has joined the network every year since LASPO came into force. ‘That is not a story of a sector in retreat,’ insists Bishop. Rather, ‘it’s the story of a sector that refuses to give up, in spite of, not because of, the government’s approach to access to justice’.
Demand for law centre services is rising faster than they can meet it. At Central England Law Centre (CELC) – the biggest centre in the country – there was a 25% increase in the number of enquiries between 2023 and 2025. Frustratingly, there has also been a 10.5% rise in people being turned away due to capacity, something Bishop says is replicated across the network.
The sector is also experiencing a long-term workforce crisis. Specialist social welfare lawyers are not being trained in sufficient numbers because the career path is not viable at current legal aid rates. Policy in Practice’s report shows that where law centres cannot help people, there are fewer alternative sources of assistance, with only one in five people able to get help elsewhere.
Elayne Hill, chief executive at CELC, observes: ‘The research confirms what we see every day. When we cannot take a case on, or it falls outside the scope we are funded to cover, it is very unlikely someone will secure help elsewhere [because] there is simply too little free or affordable legal advice available’.
This, she confirms, reflects ‘an underfunded and fragmented system, where demand far outstrips capacity’.
Greater Manchester Law Centre (GMLC), for example, which has the largest legal aid housing team in the region, is currently turning away two-thirds of housing enquiries (concerning evictions and homelessness) due to capacity, not eligibility.
'A government serious about prevention and justice should see law centres as core social infrastructure'
Nimrod Ben-Cnaan, the Law Centres Network
Fighting fires on ‘a burning platform’
The Law Centres Network’s (LCN) annual survey 2025 described its members as being ‘on a burning platform’. There is a pressing need now for stable and sustainable funding arrangements. Some centres are still smarting from the effects of the Legal Aid Agency data breach in March 2025.
Two years ago, the Ministry of Justice’s Review of Civil Legal Aid highlighted the need for higher legal aid fees. They have since risen, but only for housing and immigration work.
Nimrod Ben-Cnaan, head of policy and profile at the LCN, stresses: ‘We are not asking for charity.’ He suggests that there are two ‘credible, proven mechanisms that could provide vital additional funding for access to justice’. The government is currently consulting on proposals to divert interest from law firms’ client accounts (ILCA) to the Ministry of Justice.
Ben-Cnaan suggests law centres could benefit from that cash, but what the government has proposed instead ‘is a Treasury mechanism dressed up as reform’. He would like to see a scheme that is ‘independently managed, transparently governed and dedicated to access to justice’, similar to those which have operated for decades in the US, Canada and Australia.
One funding mechanism that is already delivering for access to justice is undistributed damages from opt-out collective actions. This, he suggests, needs to be maintained and developed.
The Access to Justice Foundation (ATJF) is the prescribed charity to receive undistributed opt-out collective action damages. It received the first payment from Gutmann v South Western Trains and Anor – a £25m Competition Appeal Tribunal settlement in which only £216,500 was claimed by affected passengers. ATJF was handed £3.78m in September 2025.
Three law centres – Speakeasy, Southern England and Cambridge House – were among organisations that received grants from that distribution.
‘As with ILCA, these are resources generated within the legal system that should be reinvested in the legal system,’ says Ben-Cnaan. ‘The question is whether the government is serious about access to justice or whether this remains aspirational.’
Added rights
Law centres report that employment law is an emerging and growing pressure point. This is driven by the Employment Rights Act 2025, which expanded workers’ rights without expanding the capacity to enforce them. Across Greater Manchester, there are only three community-based, free-to-access employment specialist advisers for 2.8m inhabitants. That is around one adviser per million people.
Additional demand will also flow from the overhaul of the private rented sector in the Renters’ Rights Act 2026. This abolishes ‘no-fault’ evictions, eliminates fixed-term contracts in favour of indefinite rolling tenancies and prevents landlords from refusing tenants with children or who are on benefits.
In fact, the act has indirectly led to a surge in work – landlords took advantage of ‘no fault’ evictions before the ban took effect.
A particularly alarming pattern emerged in London, where Southwark Law Centre has been supporting residents in mass evictions. Here, private landlords who own entire blocks issued notices simultaneously to large numbers of residents. Their aim was to convert properties into homes of multiple occupancy or temporary accommodation before the ban took effect.
Law centres are already seeing more complex possession claims, with a rise in challenges to rent increases being used as de facto eviction mechanisms, and an increase in tenants asking for help in enforcing rights they did not previously know they had.
Of course, many of the new rights are enforceable only by local authorities rather than directly by tenants. Without adequate resourcing of enforcement, those rights exist only on paper.
‘What’s the point of adding additional rights if you’ve got no ability to enforce them?’ says Jason Tetley, GMLC director. He explains that almost all tenant-based disputes in the private-rented sector place the tenant as the defendant in proceedings, not the claimant. ‘In other words, even defending a right under the new act requires a tenant to mount a legal defence rather than simply assert an entitlement,’ he says.
Disrepair remains a critical issue and is similarly outside the scope of legal aid, unless there is a serious risk to health or it is raised as a counterclaim in a rent arrears possession case. ‘That leaves a huge swathe of tenants without effective recourse, other than turning to a no-win, no-fee market saturated by claim farms,’ says Oliver Moore, housing caseworker at Tower Hamlets Law Centre.
Shortages in legal assistance provision also exist across welfare benefits, education, family and community care. Such shortages are compounded by poor transport, digital exclusion and weak connectivity in many areas of greatest need. To maximise efficiency, law centres are seeking to use multiple channels to deliver advice, using face-to-face, online, court-embedded and community-based methods. Some have developed strategic legal partnerships and hub models with health, housing and voluntary sector organisations.
These adaptations and innovations are of limited use, however, without stable funding and qualified supervisors.
‘Law centres have always been embedded in their communities – working alongside housing associations, health services, food banks, the organisations that people turn to first when things go wrong,’ says Bishop. What is changing, she adds, is the complexity and scale of that work.
Working with and against AI
Could artificial intelligence help? Yes, though it is no panacea.
Law centres are at an early stage of AI engagement. They approach it with the caution of a sector that knows its clients are among those most exposed to AI being used against them. That negative use takes the form of automated rent-arrears systems, algorithmic benefit decisions and AI-generated eviction notices.
Nevertheless, the network has begun building the governance infrastructure to support responsible AI adoption. This includes publishing a guide setting out clear principles, drafting AI policy templates, and training on safe use, including prompt engineering, hallucination risks, data protection and oversight requirements.
While stressing that generative AI cannot meet the legal needs of clients or support regulated work, Claire Stern, deputy CEO of the CELC, says there are opportunities to use automation to support CELC’s triage processes. The centre has worked with international firm Hogan Lovells Cadwalader and Law Fairy, one of the first tech companies to be regulated by the Solicitors Regulation Authority, to develop an intake handling and decision support system for immigration law. This supports routes to citizenship for undocumented children.
Stern explains that the product ‘uses a structured decision pathway to reach an auditable output. By embedding our immigration knowledge and expertise directly into how the technology works, it helps identify the right route and flags where a real lawyer is needed, rather than replacing one’. She adds: ‘AI is a tool we’re learning to use carefully, but it is not a solution to underfunding.’
Ben-Cnaan concurs: ‘AI innovation absolutely presents opportunities for law centres to reach and support more people – many of whom already turn to AI for information.’ But he adds: ‘We are clear that a chatbot cannot represent someone at a tribunal and it can’t spot when a landlord has failed to comply with deposit protection rules.’
Responding to the issues raised in this piece, an MoJ spokeswoman said: ‘We know civil legal aid is vital for vulnerable people to access justice.’
She cited the extra £20m a year that the government had put into civil justice to fix the ‘strained legal aid system this government inherited’, on top of nearly £20m in grant funding ‘to strengthen legal support and deliver swifter justice for people experiencing social welfare problems’.
Insofar as it goes, such recognition and funding is welcome. But when the legal assistance needed so often arises from decisions taken by government bodies, it is surely the case that improvements in the fairness and accuracy of those decisions would ensure that new money could make further inroads into the vast scale of unmet legal needs.
Catherine Baksi is a freelance journalist
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