Legal aid in crisis: join us to organise and speak out!

Accessing free legal advice for migrants and refugees is getting harder. In this blog our Access to Justice Organiser, Frances Timberlake, shares why we’ve been bringing different organisations, communities and impacted people together to speak out and organise: from community education to engaging political representatives and an event in Parliament.

Read on to learn how you can join the campaign and be amongst 90 organisations organising for a well-resourced, sustainable legal aid system.


Navigating the UK’s immigration system when it is designed to be hostile is incredibly difficult. If you go ‘wrong’ – a delay in an application, an incorrect form used – it can be life-changing. 

Members of Migrants Organise and South London Refugee Association speaking about the crisis in Legal aid with MP Bell Ribeiro-Addy

Problems with your immigration status can mean deteriorating health, homelessness, being detained or even being deported. So, good quality legal advice is essential being able to lead settled, safe and secure lives. But many people are excluded from accessing legal advice at all.

Successive government cuts to the legal aid system as well as to wider public services have meant that many providers of legal aid have had to shut down, fewer people are eligible for legal aid and for those who are still eligible, it’s almost impossible to find. 

Legal Aid in crisis

At Migrants Organise it has always been challenging to connect our members with quality legal advice, but in recent years it has felt almost impossible. Each week our caseworkers spend hours sorting through lists of legal aid providers, reaching out to them only to be told there is no capacity.

Now, over 50% of people seeking asylum in England and Wales cannot access a legal aid lawyer. In early 2024, our rate for successfully matching our members to an immigration lawyer was as low as 1.3%. Some of our members wait for the best part of a year before they get representation. The impact is devastating. Having no legal advice on your asylum application can mean an unfair refusal, leading to risk of homelessness and destitution. 

But we know that the problem is felt across all areas of law, not just immigration. Legal aid pay rates have not increased since 1996, which the Big Issue recently reported to represent a 48% decrease in real terms. Indeed, between 2010-2018 the overall legal aid budget was cut by £950 million

Moses- Migrants Organise member shares his experience of accessing legal aid

The crisis in legal aid affects everyone and is grinding communities across the country into the ground. What starts as an individuals’ problem – whether that be a housing issue, a family issue or a social care issue – becomes compounded into long-term problems for them and their wider communities. 

It’s a system manufactured to spiral into crisis, and it’s avoidable.

Taking action

This is why we have been bringing together our members along with legal professionals and organisers to take action. Our member, Moses says: “I remember my own asylum case—it took me nearly eight months to secure a legal aid lawyer after sending more than 50 emails to different solicitors, all of whom rejected me due to their overwhelming caseloads”.

Moses has been one of many of our members speaking out and identifying strategic ways to organise for a sustainable and well-funded legal aid system. Together with our partners at Young Legal Aid Lawyers and the Legal Aid Practitioners Group we’ve been building the campaign to #TakeYourMPToWork – to bring MPs to the frontline of legal advice work and show them why taking action on this issue is so crucial to communities.

With a fresh cohort of MPs in Parliament, many of whom may go on to have influential future roles in government, this is a key time to remind them that they work for us. This is about putting legal aid back on the agenda.

Over 90 organisations – from legal aid providers to support charities to community groups – have now signed up to the Take Your MP to Work campaign. Many of them have already held conversations with their political representatives.

The idea is that local support networks – whether that be community organisations, legal advisers or legal aid firms – build their power by coming together, being in solidarity in the challenges they face and uniting in their demands.

We are stronger when we speak out collectively. Here is what some of the participating organisations have said about the campaign:

“The absence of any mention of legal aid within the new government’s agenda highlighted the need to meet with our local MP to make sure that this issue was being brought to attention locally and nationally. Vauxhall Law Centre, alongside many other advice agencies and Law Centres Network, urged our MP, Kim Johnson, to ensure that the new government committed to make positive changes to Legal Aid. We are pleased to have engaged our local MP who has confirmed that she is committed to raising these issues to the Secretary of State for Justice” Vauxhall Law Centre, Liverpool

“It was heartening and refreshing to meet with our MP (Carla Denyer) who, along with her caseworkers, was engaged on the topic of immigration legal aid, enthusiastic to support the cause however she could, and willing to engage with us and the wider refugee support sector across Bristol further going forward” Bristol Law Centre

“Through our visit with Bell Ribeiro-Addy, we got to learn more about her as an MP and what she advocates for, and we’re glad to have someone who’s ready to go with us. The advice I would give to other people is: stand up and speak up to your MP. Sometimes we think they won’t be ready to talk to us, but we don’t know until we reach out to them. Our MPs work for us, we don’t work for them. People power is unlimited, and those people are us” – Nanou, member of Migrants Organise, London

On November 4th 2024 we’ll be hosting an event in Parliament bringing together MPs, community members, lawyers and organisations to share our experiences and vision for a legal aid system that truly delivers access to justice. We believe that change happens from the bottom up. Let’s make sure that our new politicians are listening to us on the frontline.


If you’re struggling to access the legal advice you need- then check out these resources:

Our friends at JCWI have produced the “Access to Justice Toolkit” (available in English, Amharic, Arabic, Tamil and Urdu.) At Migrants Organise we have also produced this short advice flyer for people going through the appeals process without a legal representative.