ABSTRACT
In 2013, England and Wales implemented a legal aid reform that sharply reduced public funding for civil legal assistance, eliminating early-stage support and restricting aid to lastresort, courtroom interventions. This paper examines the broader socioeconomic and public health consequences, focusing on vulnerable households facing housing, debt, and welfare disputes. Using panel data from 2009-2023 on legal aid provider locations, service volumes, court filings, and mortality, we quantify the reform’s effects on access to justice and downstream outcomes. Our empirical strategy combines a difference-indifferences design exploiting spatial and temporal variation in access driven by provider closures, with a Bartikstyle instrument based on pre-reform exposure to funding cuts. Exposed areas experienced significant increases in eviction filings and court orders, alongside rises in homelessness and mortality, with effects compounded in areas simultaneously hit by welfare benefit cuts. By defunding early advice and narrowing legal aid to specific practice areas, the reform limited providers’ ability to address interconnected problems, rendering the integrated service model-where early intervention, cross-domain casework, and court representation were co-located-financially unviable. Providers delivering this model exited disproportionately, severing the link between upstream problem-solving and court-stage protection. Early advice and court-stage representation appear as complements, not substitutes: preserving one without the other left the most vulnerable households worse off across multiple dimensions. These findings highlight the role of access to justice in social protection and suggest that cutting preventive legal services shifts costs onto local authorities and healthcare systems, revealing unintended long-term consequences of retrenching the social safety net through legal reform.
Uraz, Juliet-Nil, Justice Under Austerity: The Impacts of Reduced Access to Legal Assistance in England and Wales (March 22, 2024).
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