Member

The House should be in no doubt that the Legal Aid Agency has suffered an unacceptable attack on its systems at the hands of criminals. Sadly, that attack is not altogether surprising; the vulnerabilities in the Legal Aid Agency systems have been known for many years. The risk of such an attack was steadily growing during the previous Government’s tenure, but they took no meaningful action to fix the systems, leaving them vulnerable to attack. The previous Government were repeatedly warned about the Legal Aid Agency systems being old, inflexible and unstable. In 2023, the Law Society called on the Government to urgently invest in the Legal Aid Agency digital system, saying that the system was ‘too fragile to cope’. In March 2024, the Law Society pointed to the agency’s ‘antiquated IT systems’ as