The government has announced new legal aid regulations that will afford better rights to UK citizens across the EU - and have stressed that the measures will not eat into this country's budget.


The regulations, which implement the EU directive on cross-border legal aid provision, are aimed at establishing funding throughout the EU on a reciprocal basis.



UK citizens who are financially eligible according to individual country rules will now be able to receive legal aid and assistance in civil disputes throughout the EU. Citizens from EU countries seeking legal aid in the UK will likewise have to qualify under the rules of the UK domestic scheme as well as the directive.



A spokeswoman for the Department for Constitutional Affairs said: 'In practice, we have been doing this for a while already. We are not expecting this to cause any more of a drain on our legal aid budget.'



Legal Aid Practitioners Group director Richard Miller said: 'This will be of more use to UK citizens who run into problems abroad, because the UK system, for all its recent problems, remains one of the broadest in Europe. Britain remains, per capita, the best-funded system, but that may in part be due to the fact that we have a common law and adversarial legal system.'