‘No Access to Justice 2’: Mapping the UK’s continuing immigration and asylum legal advice crisis – A report by Jo Wilding, June 2025
June 9, 2025
Director of Justice Together Hazel Williams reflects on the key themes emerging from our new report into immigration and asylum legal advice provision.
This new report by Jo Wilding updates her 2023 report on the provision of immigration and asylum legal advice across the UK. It examines legal aid and other free or low-cost services in England and Wales, Scotland, and Northern Ireland, discussing emerging themes, before moving to a region-by-region analysis of demand and provision.
Two years on, this research has found that a number of factors have led to an increase in demand for immigration advice, and as a result an increase in the number of people unable to access justice. In England and Wales there is a gap of at least 57% between legal aid provision and eligible asylum legal aid need.
Access to quality immigration legal advice is the cornerstone of accessing justice for many people within the UK immigration system. It can unlock access to rights such as housing, healthcare, education, work, to be joined by your family and ultimately to settle with dignity in the UK. In many cases it can be lifesaving.
Beyond the human benefits, quality immigration advice can provide well evidenced cost savings. It can prevent unnecessary and expensive appeals processes, unnecessary accommodation and support costs to Local Authorities and allow people to work and contribute. See ‘It’s a no-brainer’, Jo’s previous report.
Given all this, it still seems criminal that something so basic as access to information and advice about your rights has been so purposefully decimated over the years, by a government intent on hostility towards migrants.
The legal advice and migration sectors have been under immense pressure. Their resilience is nothing short of herculean, in the face of extreme challenges in relation to funding, legislative changes and complexity and an increasingly hostile political environment.
This report provides vital insight and data on what is actually happening across the UK with immigration advice provision and need, broken down by country and region. The themes emerging continue to be around recruitment and retention, especially around supervisory level. This is a priority for Justice Together in funding and supporting training and supervision of specialist immigration advisors. Further issues are both the inadequate immigration legal aid fees to cover actual costs and the extensive bureaucracy and auditing pressures on small organisations – making for many legal aid contracts unworkable.
There are a number of key recommendations in the report, for the various different actors involved. These include ensuring early access to legal advice in the immigration system, creating a streamlined asylum process, abolishing the ten year route and reviewing the audit process for legal aid.
I hope you find this report useful and are able to push the various recommendations.
Huge thank you to Jo Wilding for all her work in bringing this together, to our funder partners for all their support and to all the immigration advice practitioners for providing advice and supporting people to navigate what has become such a complex and hostile legislative system.
Hazel Williams
Director of Justice Together