Contribution
My Lords, I rise to move Amendment 137. I also declare my registered interest as the unremunerated, non-executive chair of the board of trustees of the Leicester Law Centre. I remind the Committee that I am also the co-chair of the All-Party Parliamentary Group on Access to Justice.
I thank noble Lords who have put their names to my amendment and others who have expressed their support. I also thank those from outside the House who have provided excellent briefing and particular assistance to me and other noble Lords.
In the Government’s own words, the UK’s asylum and immigration system is “broken”. In few areas is this damage more obvious than in the struggle people face accessing legal aid immigration advice, due largely to so-called “legal deserts”. This stems, of course, as so much does these days, from the drastic cuts to legal aid following the Legal Aid, Sentencing and Punishment of Offenders Act 2012, always known as LASPO. Immigration legal aid is, in the words of the Public Law Project,
“an advice sector that has collapsed”,
leaving individuals
“adrift in an ocean of unmet need”.
The facts are fairly brutal. In June 2025, the Law Society estimated that 63% of people in England and Wales could not access a local immigration legal aid solicitor. The result is that 50% of claimants are unrepresented in asylum claims and appeals. In real terms, this means that almost 55,000 people are left without a legal aid representative at the time they need one.
This amendment is about that crisis. Its purpose is to place a duty on the Lord Chancellor to make civil legal aid available within 48 hours to individuals in immigration detention. This will ensure that people who are perhaps in fear for their life, safety and future are supported at a time of obvious extreme vulnerability and helped to navigate the confusing—to put it mildly—labyrinth that is the UK immigration system. Importantly, it will also save taxpayer money by facilitating better decisions earlier on.
Recent announcements have made early access to legal aid more pressing than ever. The first people have been detained as part of the Government’s pilot of the UK-France migration treaty, which facilitates expedited deportations. In addition, the Government are intending to expand the “deport now, appeal later” scheme. It has also been suggested that the Government plan to replace tribunals with independent adjudicators to speed up appeals. On top of this, we are seeing an expansion of the detention estate, such as the reopening of Campsfield House immigration removal centre in Oxfordshire, enabling more people to be detained.
The recent increases in immigration legal aid fees announced by the previous Lord Chancellor—now the Home Secretary—are very welcome. She recognised herself that the changes were designed only to
“stabilise the system and prop up the bits that are most likely to experience system failure”.
As the Institute for Fiscal Studies has confirmed, the increases will go nowhere near restoring the Ministry of Justice budget to pre-cuts levels, with the legal aid budget being 36% lower than in 2008.
The increases announced also do not deal with the unique and urgent challenges of accessing legal advice in immigration detention and are unlikely to prevent system failure in that context. This amendment is a further step in supporting the Government’s efforts to prop up the most broken part of our legal aid system.
I want to address directly why the Government and the House should support making legal aid available for migrants in detention. First, it is to ensure the sovereignty of Parliament; if people cannot obtain legal advice and challenge Home Office decisions when they may be unlawful, the laws passed by Parliament are, frankly, not worth the paper they are written on.
Secondly, this amendment supports the rule of law, of which access to justice is a vital part, as the Committee will surely agree. As the noble and learned Lord, Lord Neuberger, put it in 2017:
“Obtaining advice and representation does not merely mean that competent lawyers exist; it also must mean that their advice and representation are sensibly affordable to ordinary people and businesses: access to justice is a practical, not a hypothetical, requirement”.