A right is only as good as the people willing to deliver it. Legal aid has been squeezed from every direction: rates that haven’t kept pace, administration that eats into already stretched hours, and an ageing profession with too few coming to maintain anything close to the replacement rate. Two in five solicitors say they plan to stop legal aid work within two years or aren’t sure they’ll continue, and in north-east Scotland no solicitor will take on legal aid asylum and immigration cases. Far too many people spend days, if not weeks, calling central-belt-based solicitors, often without hearing a yes, and are thus forced to go to court alone.

The bottleneck in access to justice is so pronounced for migrants with NRPF, particularly those seeking asylum given how often they interact with the legal system: asylum claims, visa and change of conditions applications and many more. Ferreira and colleagues document how people seeking asylum with a misspelt, anglicised name can have a claim rejected and be forced to resubmit and restart the process, and how Home Office letters can demand documents within two weeks of the date, leaving as little as nine days once Royal Mail has done its work. A lost appeal can quickly become a lost home, dignity or even legal status. For children, particularly unaccompanied asylum-seeking children whose age has been wrongly judged, representation is the difference between being protected as a child and being treated as an adult.

Start with what legal aid is for. If the purpose is to manage demand, the system will be built to turn people away and deny them access to justice; if the purpose is above all else to secure access, it will be built to let them in. We argue for the latter, set in statute so that it can be held to account. That means treating funding as the thing that keeps providers in place, not a cost to be minimised, and funding rules that recognise that trauma-informed advice takes time and that remote consultations shouldn’t replace in-person help where trust and confidentiality are at stake.

Underfunding services that are quasi-public goods rarely saves money in absolute terms; instead, it often shifts the bill to housing, health, and benefits, leaving the problem exactly where it was. Research from Northern Ireland evidences a £9 return for every £1 spent on legal aid. Legal aid also doesn’t exist in a vacuum. It touches asylum support, social security, and the courts at every turn, so reform should consolidate and reflect those links and, above all else, involve people with lived experience of the system and aware of its benefits and idiosyncrasies.

We support most of the proposals, as long as they are properly resourced and safeguarded, because the underlying logic is shared: remove friction from the system, since time is a scarce resource.

Simpler, more consistent contributions mean applicants can understand what they’re being asked to pay, and regular reviews stop thresholds from shutting people out; the capital threshold has stood at £13,017 since 2011. The same is true of Advice and Assistance, whose thresholds haven’t moved in that time; raising them would cost an estimated £4 million, and means tests that ignore urgency, such as fleeing abuse or facing homelessness, should be reconsidered.

People with NRPF can use legal aid, but many don’t know it, so they should be reminded, clearly and as often as possible, that it is not a public fund.

The same logic applies to providers. A high-trust model, where accredited solicitors decide whether a case merits funding and are checked afterwards, removes the waits that cost most when time is shortest: applications can delay casework by weeks, while someone refused asylum has only 14 days to appeal, and Scotland’s peer review already provides the foundations of which to expand from. Widening eligibility to non-profits follows from the same thinking, since harms shared by many are challenging, if not impossible, for one person to take on. Friction should not be removed at the expense of trust, though. Data sharing only helps if people are willing to take part, and for migrants who fear immigration enforcement, particularly survivors of abuse, any link to the police or the Home Office would keep them away.

All of it needs someone accountable for delivery, which is why we favour an independent body with powers to act if objectives aren’t met. On who delivers, from our point of view, the right model is whichever works and can provide a stream of highly qualified legal professionals to those who need their services, including using the third sector as a trusted first step and a route into legal training. Properly funded, legal aid enables every other right to be exercised.