Question to the Ministry of Justice:
To ask the Secretary of State for Justice, if he will passport all (a) children and (b) young people aged from 18 to 24 through the Exceptional Case Funding scheme.
Parliament agreed an exceptional case funding scheme to provide an avenue for providing legal aid to those cases that would normally be out of scope, in order to ensure we meet our obligations under the European Convention on Human Rights and European Union law.
The civil legal aid exceptional funding scheme does not provide a general power to fund cases or individuals that fall outside the scope of legal aid – that is not its purpose. We therefore have no current plans to passport all children and/or young people aged from 18 to 24 through the scheme.