Justice Under Austerity: The Impacts of Reduced Access to Legal Assistance in England and Wales

In 2013, England and Wales implemented sweeping legal aid reforms that reduced public funding for civil legal assistance by 80%, eliminated early-stage support, and restricted aid to last-resort courtroom interventions. This study investigates the broader socioeconomic and public health consequences, focusing on vulnerable households navigating eviction, debt, and welfare disputes. Using panel data from 2009–2023 on provider locations and service volumes, I quantify the reform’s effects on access to justice and downstream outcomes. The empirical strategy combines a difference-in-differences design exploiting spatial and temporal variation from provider closures with a Bartik-style instrument based on pre-reform exposure to funding cuts. I also leverage variation in austerity intensity to test whether legal aid cuts amplified the impact of simultaneous welfare retrenchments. Preliminary results indicate increased eviction, homelessness, and mortality in the most affected areas, particularly when combined with rental assistance cuts. These effects operate through two key mechanisms. First, legal aid professionals traditionally served as welfare state navigators, identifying client needs critical to both legal resolution and wellbeing—such as unclaimed benefits or untreated mental health conditions. By restricting funding to narrowly defined cases, the reform limited lawyers’ ability to address interconnected issues. For instance, while eviction representation remained covered, assistance with underlying benefits claims causing rent arrears was eliminated. To test this mechanism, I link administrative welfare records to legal assistance data in a pilot area, tracking clients’ financial outcomes over two years and surveying them on how legal support shaped their access to other services. Second, the reform distorted the provider market by crowding out generalist firms working across multiple legal domains. While aiming to consolidate the sector, the policy halved provider numbers, exacerbating spatial inequality in provision by creating legal deserts. Remaining specialists were often ill-equipped to assist clients with multifaceted problems like eviction intertwined with domestic violence. These structural shifts degraded core access pillars—availability, affordability, and proximity—and undermined the integrative function generalist lawyers previously served. Although the reform reduced government legal aid spending, it generated hidden costs across other sectors. By eliminating early support, it contributed to more complex downstream cases and increased local spending on temporary accommodation. Using a Marginal Value for Public Funds framework, this study highlights the role of access to justice in inequality reproduction—cutting preventive legal services not only displaces costs to local authorities and healthcare systems but systematically disadvantages those least able to exercise their social rights, entrenching cycles of poverty and exclusion.