Housing: Biggest reach of legal aid deserts
There has been a sharp rise in the number of people living in legal aid deserts for family and criminal law, while around 14.5m people overall are in deserts for at least one primary area of practice, according to new research.
Housing is the area where there is the largest shortage of provision, with 6.6m people living in local authorities found to be deserts, following by immigration (4.6m people), family (4.2m), employment law (4.1m) and criminal (3.6m).
However, the housing figure is nearly half of that when LexisNexis last conducted this research in 2022, when it was 12.1m.
It only looked at two other areas then, finding that 1.1m people lived in family legal aid deserts and 2.1m in criminal.
In the 2026 Legal Aid Deserts Report, LexisNexis classed 91 local authorities as legal aid deserts in at least one of these five categories, making up 23.4% of the population of England and Wales.
Within this, 37 local authorities, with a combined population of 5.4m, were deserts for at least two areas of practice, while eight local authorities were deserts for four or all five: Babergh, Breckland, Derbyshire Dales, East Cambridgeshire, East Devon, Rutland, South Norfolk and West Berkshire.
LexisNexis found that many of the areas identified as legal aid deserts in 2022 have not recovered: seven of the 15 weakest-access housing deserts and eight of the 15 weakest-access crime deserts from 2022 were still deserts today.
“The same communities are stuck without access, year after year,” said Josh Giddens, executive sponsor of rule of law at LexisNexis.
“What’s changed in 2026 is how deep that lack of access now runs in some places. South Norfolk is now a legal aid desert across all five areas of law we examined.
“These are compounding failures: the same rural communities, largely across the East of England and East Midlands, facing high legal need on every front and support on none of them.”
LexisNexis used public data on legal aid provider locations, population, local authority geography and area-specific indicators of legal need, applying a 15km catchment rule to reflect nearby access to support.
Local authorities in the bottom 10% of the resulting access measure were classified as legal aid deserts for demonstrating a high need for legal support but “comparatively weak” access to legal aid provision.
The findings suggested that the sharpest access gaps were often concentrated in smaller, rural, coastal and semi-rural authorities.
Regionally, the weakest-performing authorities were concentrated most heavily in the East of England, the East Midlands and parts of the South-East, with further pressure points in the South West.
London, by contrast, was largely absent from the most acute legal aid desert lists.
The report stressed the importance of early legal advice in helping to stop problems worsening into crises.
Ian McDougall, president of the LexisNexis Rule of Law Foundation, commented: “A safety net catches people after they have fallen, but a good legal aid system should also help prevent people from falling in the first place.
“From a rule of law perspective, people must be able to understand, exercise and enforce their legal rights in practice. Rights that exist on paper have limited value if people cannot realistically access a remedy.”
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