To ask Her Majesty’s Government how many applications for exceptional case funding (non-inquests) have been made to the Legal Aid Agency on behalf of applicants aged under 18 each year since the scheme began in April 2013; and of those, how many were granted.
Answered on
17 November 2015
The purpose of the Exceptional Case Funding (ECF) scheme is to provide funding where it is legally needed. It does not provide a general power to fund cases which fall outside the scope of legal aid. Legal aid is a vital part of our justice system, but we cannot escape the continuing need to reduce the deficit. We still have a very generous system - last year we spent £1.6bn on legal aid, around a quarter of the department’s expenditure. Every ECF application is carefully considered by the Legal Aid Agency on an individual basis.
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Note: Age data for Exceptional Case Funding was collected from October 2013 onwards, hence the larger volume of unknowns in 2013-14 compared to the other years. |
1The latest available published data is up to June 2015 so figures for 2015-16 are for one quarter only.