Keir Starmer’s pledge to clear the asylum backlog is under threat because of a shortage of legal aid solicitors, experts have said.
More than 54,000 people seeking asylum or appealing against a refusal in a tribunal in England and Wales this year – 57% of the total – were unable to access a legal aid lawyer, figures show.
Last year, 37,450 asylum applicants were unable to obtain publicly funded representation. In 2020-21 the number was 6,245, or 17% of the total.
The knock-on effects are that asylum seekers represent themselves, cases take longer to hear, some have to be postponed and many more are likely to be appealed, legal experts say.
The figures have emerged as the justice secretary, Shabana Mahmood, is expected to announce this week that she will increase legal aid rates for asylum seekers.”
The hourly rate for immigration legal aid has remained at £52 since 1996, meaning there has been a 48% cut in pay in real terms for this work.
Colin Yeo, a barrister and the author of the Free Movement blog, said: “The cuts to legal aid over the last decade have so degraded the advice sector that there are simply too few lawyers left to take on cases. Without lawyers to help at court, everything takes longer, meaning that asylum seekers end up in hotels and accommodation longer than would otherwise be the case.”
Labour’s manifesto said the party would “clear the Conservatives’ backlog and end asylum hotels, saving the taxpayer billions of pounds”.
But the asylum tribunal system is facing a dearth of qualified lawyers after cuts to legal aid. Some solicitor firms have withdrawn from asylum work because the fees have failed to rise with inflation.
The latest data was obtained by Jo Wilding, a senior law lecturer at Sussex University, via freedom of information requests and government releases. She calculated that at least 54,555 people claiming asylum or appealing against a refusal in a tribunal had been unable to access a legal aid representative this year.
Wilding said: “There are a lot of firms and charities which are only doing tiny amounts of legal aid work, because they have to subsidise it from private work or grant funding. For people applying for asylum it’s a disaster, because they need to put together their evidence and they don’t know what they need to collect or how to prove what’s happened to them.”
In September, Mahmood settled a case with the solicitors firm Duncan Lewis about the failure to raise legal aid rates on asylum cases, and she has agreed to make a decision on whether to raise fees for immigration and asylum legal aid work in November .
The average annual cost to the taxpayer of each asylum seeker has risen from about £17,000 in 2019-20 to approximately £41,000 in 2023-24, according to a report by the IPPR thinktank.
A Ministry of Justice spokesperson said: “The new government has inherited a justice system in crisis. We are committed to working with the legal profession to ensure the legal aid sector is on a sustainable footing, both now and in the future. We have conducted a review of the civil legal aid system and are carefully considering options for reform, including for immigration and asylum cases.”
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