The Legal Aid Agency (LAA) published updated guidance on who qualifies for civil legal aid on its website last week (11 January 2019).
Resources available on the site include guides to scope, merits and means, as well as links to the relevant regulations. The civil legal aid calculator tool has links to the relevant forms. The LAA is encouraging practitioners to use the online calculator rather undertaking manual calculations.
Other information available via links on the LAA site include further useful statutory instruments, clarification on immigration funding for trafficking cases and leaflets aimed at advice providers.
The LAG Legal Aid Handbook 2018/19 is out now – featuring full coverage of the civil and criminal schemes, fully revised and updated and including the 2018 civil contract. This edition includes brand new chapters on CCMS and community care, specialist chapters on housing, family, mental health, immigration and crime work, and greatly expanded coverage of civil costs. Written by a team of legal aid experts and edited by Vicky Ling, Simon Pugh and Sue James, it’s the one book no legal aid lawyer can afford to be without. Order your copy here now.
Legal Aid Handbook 
The problem with that updated LAA webpage is that all the links to the various LASPOA Regulations are to non-consolidated versions on the Government’s legislation website. The LAA webpage makes no reference to the fact that there have been several sets of amending regulations and so gives the impression that each of those sets of regs are up to date but they are not as most of those (e.g. means one, merits one, remuneration one) have been updated by amending regs several times since April 2013. The legislation website doesn’t hold an updated version of the regs but rather only the original version. One could easily think that if they select a link to a set of regs on this LAA webpage, they will be taken to the current version of those regs but they won’t be and so actually without any warning or caution, I think this LAA webpage isn’t very helpful and at worst could be really unhelpful to provider firms.
Thanks Noel – we completely agree. This is something we have been saying for years. We have been trying to collect the regulations together on the resources page of this blog in such a way that providers can make sense of them but it isn’t easy on our voluntary resources!