Social Welfare and Immigration Legal Aid: Mapping need, provision and accessibility

Legal advice is vital to accessing asylum or immigration status and many social and welfare rights such as housing, welfare benefits, and community care. Yet access to legal advice has been affected by legal aid changes and local authority funding decisions (Organ and Sigafoos, 2017. As a result, some regions in the UK are 'advice deserts', where no free legal advice is available.

However, my earlier work also described 'advice droughts', where services appear to exist but are inaccessible in practice because there are barriers to organisations doing the work or to clients using them. My work has shown that, in immigration law in England and Wales (E&W), cuts to funding cause conflict between quality of services, financial viability for providers, and access for clients.

It is unclear whether the same applies for all categories of law and in all three legal aid models in the UK.

This project examines access to legal advice across the UK, focussing on what the research characterises as the Social Welfare and Immigration Legal Aid (SWILA) sector. The research (acronym SWILAMap) extends my research from E&W to the four nations/three systems of the UK, focusing on housing, welfare benefits, community care and immigration work, which constitute a manageable, but reasonably representative, sample of the core SWILA work.

SWILAMap takes a multi-layered geographical approach, examining the issues at cross-national, national and local levels. SWILAMap undertakes the first comparison of how the three different systems for legal aid delivery, in Scotland, Northern Ireland (NI), and England and Wales (E&W), affect organisations' ability to undertake the work, across the branches of the legal profession.

It investigates the uneven geographies of legal need, legal advice provision, and accessibility of that provision to users.

The Access to Justice Foundation (ATJF) is a non-academic partner. As a UK-wide charity funding access to justice and advice delivery projects, ATJF has a unique body of data on legal advice need, provision and local referral networks in its funding applications and grant reports. ATJF is keen to have this evidence used for research and to participate in the steering group and policy seminars.

SWILAMap has three key sub-projects: 1) applying the Descriptive Mapping methodology, which I devised, to better understand regional and sub-regional variation in demand and supply in each category of SWILA, from both provider and user perspectives; 2) identifying local, national and cross-national barriers to provision and quality within the UK legal aid systems across different legal fields; and 3) using a Knowledge Exchange approach, with practitioners and policy-makers, to identify and overcome barriers to SWILA provision. Data will be collected through semi-structured interviews, and analysis of the ATJF application and grant report datasets, supported with Freedom of Information requests, ensuring thorough coverage of each of the areas of law and jurisdictions.

I will collect the provider-side data and a Research Assistant (RA) will interview advice users. This will produce a unique qualitative dataset which will be thematically analysed drawing on concepts from socio-legal studies, social policy, geography and economics.

SWILAMap is timely, as Wales moves towards a devolved justice system and Scotland reviews its legal aid system, thirteen years after E&W adopted marketisation and following a decade of hostile environment policies for immigration, public sector austerity and increased welfare conditionality. Accelerating movements towards remote justice, including remote delivery of legal aid services, may reduce geographical limitations but may also be unsuitable in many SWILA cases; the pandemic offers new evidence on this.

The research is supported by an inter-disciplinary academic advisory group and steering group drawn from across the UK, which will ensure academic and policy relevance.