Legal Aid Scheme

(asked on 10th November 2023) - View Source

Question to the Ministry of Justice:

To ask the Secretary of State for Justice, what is the annual cost for the Legal Aid Agency to process escape fee claims; what proportion of escape fee claims are rejected; and what the value to the Legal Aid fund of rejected escape fee claims was in each of the last three years.


Answered by
Mike Freer Portrait
Mike Freer
Parliamentary Under-Secretary (Ministry of Justice)
This question was answered on 15th November 2023

The term ‘escape fee claim’ is used in connection with various types of legal aid work which is funded by way of fixed or standard fee, where the legislation in place allows a claim at hourly rates to be made in circumstances where the actual cost of work done escapes a set threshold. There are various types of escape fee claims. In this context we have interpreted your request as pertaining to civil Controlled Work claims billed using an EC-CLAIM1 and to crime claims billed used a CRM-18 or CRM-18a as these are explicitly described as being escape fee claims.

Information relating to the annual cost of processing escape fee claims is not centrally held. The unit cost of processing an escape fee claim is not specifically tracked or recorded by the Legal Aid Agency (LAA), nor is the administrative spend on processing escape fee claims recorded separately to general legal aid administrative spend. Staff engaged in the assessment and payment of escape fee claims may not exclusively be engaged in these functions and as such it is not possible to calculate an estimate of costs based on staff salaries.

For civil escape fee claims the proportion of escape fee claims that were rejected in each of the last three years is set out in the table below:

2020

2021

2022

16.72%

15.47%

13.2%

Please note that the above figures are based on Management Information manually collated by the LAA. Although every effort is made to ensure that the figures presented are accurate and complete, it is important to note that the data has been extracted from data sets which require a degree of manual input. As a consequence, the data can change over time and care should be taken to ensure data collection processes and their inevitable limitations are taken into account when data is used.

No criminal escape fee claims have been rejected in the last three years.

Information relating to the value to the legal aid fund of rejected claims is not centrally held. Claims are rejected in instances where there is some inaccuracy in the bill or where information or supporting documents are required. Claims are returned to the legal aid provider who will make the necessary amendments or supply any additional information so that these may be re-submitted to the LAA for payment.

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