CAB: Positive outcomes from grant
A government-funded early legal advice grant programme has enabled 70% of clients to resolve their problems at an early stage and avoid unnecessary court hearings, a Ministry of Justice (MoJ) report has found.
Advice agencies and law centres said the funding from the Improving Outcomes Through Legal Support (IOTLS) scheme was “vital for maintaining some services and even enabled the leveraging of further funding and championing of the sector”.
The MoJ, in partnership with the Access to Justice Foundation, launched the IOTLS scheme in March 2023. By the end of the original funding period in March 2025, the period covered by the report, 59 organisations based across England and Wales had shared over £10m in funding.
The MoJ announced a further £6m in March 2025 to extend the life of both the IOTLS and the Online Support and Advice scheme. Justice secretary David Lammy said in December 2025 that both IOTLS and the online support scheme would continue until September this year.
The interim evaluation report published this week said that, between October 2023 and March 2025, advice providers funded by IOTLS supported 110,000 clients with 163,000 issues. On average, 6,100 people per month were supported with 9,000 issues.
The organisations involved 12 Citizens Advice hubs and 12 law centres – and four joint operations – along with 31 independent organisations which handled specific issues such as domestic abuse, welfare benefits and housing.
Advice providers said that 69% of clients who received initial support with their issues “resolved their problems earlier and avoided unnecessarily going to court”.
Researchers said IOTLS could not only help reduce the volume of cases going to court but supported people at court to be more prepared, which “may have helped those proceedings to run more effectively”.
Positive outcomes included “helping to avoid homelessness, secure financial outcomes and wider sustainable change to circumstances, and improved mental health”.
Issues handled under the IOTLS scheme related to welfare rights (27%), housing (16%), family law (13%) and domestic abuse (12%), with employment and immigration each accounting for 8% of the workload and debt advice 4%.
Most clients were aged between 25 to 65 years old (66%), female (62%) and had a disability (55%). The majority were White (53%), with 16% from Asian and 15% from Black backgrounds.
Advice providers said they faced challenges in the form of “residual effects from Covid, increasing client case complexity and changes to legal aid”, combined with cuts to other funding and rising costs, for example in National Insurance contributions.
IOTLS funding helped them expand their scope of services and to invest in improved facilities, using their experience and data “to leverage other funding and activities”.
Advice providers communicated with their clients most commonly by telephone (46%), followed by electronic or digital means (31%) and face-to-face (24%).
Eleven providers collectively reported their online resources receiving almost 3m views, most frequently resources relating to employment, followed by welfare rights and domestic violence, housing and family law.
Looking to the future, advice providers felt further IOTLS funding would provide opportunities “to maintain and scale up” services they knew worked.
“They also identified services they felt were needed and would seek to deliver given appropriate further funding, from specific areas of law to more use of digital tools.”
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