Question to the Ministry of Justice:

To ask the Secretary of State for Justice, pursuant to the Answer of 1 July 2025 to Question 62255 on Legal Aid, how many of the Public Family Law Legal Help Fee Level 1 matter starts were for clients who were children, in each of the five years.

The requested information can be found in the below table:

Data is derived from the Legal Aid Agency’s (LAA) Official Statistics: Legal aid statistics data files - GOV.UK. The LAA also publishes a more user-friendly tool to analyse this data which can be accessed here.

Please note that as Public Law Family cases are delivered as Controlled Work, legal aid providers are permitted to self-grant legal aid under delegated functions. This means there is no application to the LAA. Data is therefore derived from claim submissions sent to the LAA at the end of the case. It is possible therefore that a small number of cases reported in the table above were opened in the previous financial year.