Hill: Research points to wider opportunity
Groundbreaking research has provided “the first hard evidence” that legal advice for low-income households improves lives – increasing incomes and improving mental health.
By linking law centre case data and local authority benefits data, it showed that households which received legal advice saw their income rise by £153 a month compared with those which did not, gains which “built up gradually and were still in place 18 to 24 months later”.
The findings suggested that legal assistance “functions not only as crisis support but also as an anti-poverty intervention with measurable economic effects”.
Researchers said “the most consistent impact” was on mental health, with a majority of clients reporting anxiety, stress or depression before making contact and two-thirds linking that distress directly to their legal problem.
Of those who received “intensive help”, 73% felt better afterwards, “an effect that often began at the first meeting, weeks or months before the case itself was resolved”.
Social policy specialists Policy in Practice, on behalf of the Legal Education Foundation, in partnership with the Central England Law Centre and Coventry City Council, tracked 110 households over 24 months for the report, Exploring the potential of administrative benefits data to evaluate the impact of legal services.
They were compared with similar low-income households that did not receive legal help. The research, which used machine learning, is being published today at the Law Centres Network’s annual conference.
It noted that, while the UK has been a pioneer in mapping the legal problems people face, there was “surprisingly little causal evidence” to show how access to legal assistance changed outcomes.
Researchers found that legal assistance increased household resources “chiefly by correcting benefit entitlements, challenging incorrect decisions, securing additional support, and ensuring that households received the assistance to which they were legally entitled”.
The effects were not confined to intensive casework. “A substantial share of law centre clients received one-off specialist advice without receiving full representation, yet this group still showed positive effects on income and poverty.”
The report pointed to areas where policy action would strengthen both the delivery of legal assistance and the evidence base for it.
“First, legal assistance works, but current funding arrangements are insufficient to enable providers to meet the level and complexity of legal need and demand.”
Central England Law Centre is the sole provider of specialist housing legal aid in Coventry. “It produces measurable returns, yet it cannot meet current demand.”
The report went on: “The cost of inaction is not zero: every eviction that earlier intervention could have prevented generates an expensive temporary accommodation placement that the council pays for.
“Funding legal assistance is not only a justice question but a public expenditure question.”
The government should fund “early, responsive, cross-domain legal advice and the partnerships between advice providers and local authorities that make it more effective”.
Legal advisers functioned as “critical navigators of the welfare system, not just legal advocates”.
Administrative data should be used to make the case and improve the response, and an expectation should be created that “this data can and should be used”.
The approach should be extended to health service records and adult social care data held by local authorities, to court outcomes, and ultimately to the full Universal Credit dataset, the report said, allowing “similarly impactful analysis to operate at national scale”.
Researchers pointed out that the report was delivered for less than 5% of the budget of the Ministry of Justice’s early legal advice pilot, launched in 2022, which cost £5m and involved over 20,000 letters being sent to residents in council tax arrears but resulted in only five people ultimately accessing the advice service.
Elayne Hill, chief executive of Central England Law Centre, said the study “moves the conversation beyond anecdotes”.
She explained: “It helps show that specialist legal advice is not a marginal service, but an essential part of any serious response to poverty, inequality and insecurity…
“It also points to a wider opportunity: using data more proactively to identify people missing out on legal advice and connect them with specialist help before problems escalate.”
Deven Ghelani, chief executive of Policy in Practice, commented: “For decades we’ve known legal advice changes lives. Now we can prove it. And the study points to something bigger.
“The data councils already hold can show exactly which households are losing money they’re owed, and when advice providers and councils act on it together, they recover that income, overturn wrong decisions and stop crises before they reach court. It works, and it costs a fraction of the alternatives.”