Specialist Legal Advice Providers Funding

We were pleased to work with the Access to Justice Foundation on a report analysing funding for ‘Specialist Legal Advice Providers’.

Published in August 2022, the report begins to map legal advice funding in England and Wales, and shows the kinds of analysis that can be done with data published in the 360Giving Data Standard.

Combined with analysis about specialist legal advice providers themselves, we’ve covered the size and scope of the sector, income sources, and lots more information about funders and funding – including the relationship between funder collaborations.

‘Specialist Legal Advice Providers’ covers

• The size and scope of the sector, and the proportion of charities that are Citizens Advice Bureaux, Law Centres, major charities and other charities.
  The trends in funding.
• The location of legal advice providers, and a regional breakdown of local Citizens Advice Bureaux and Law Centres and their spending.
• Income sources for Specialist Legal Advice Providers, bringing together government contracts and grants, funding from grantmaking foundations, fees and donations, investment income and income from the private sector.
• The proportion of Specialist Legal Advice providers receiving Legal Aid funding between 2016-21.
• Information about grant funding, including the biggest funders, ‘who funds with who’ and funding themes.

Headline findings include

• There has been a significant decline in legal aid funding for the specialist legal advice providers in the cohort analysed (down from over £20m in 2010-11 to below £15m in 2019-20).
• Income growth has stalled for the majority of charities and law centres in the cohort, in many cases not even keeping up with inflation.
• The majority of grant funding for Specialist Legal Advice Providers from funders publishing grants data using the 360Giving Data Standard comes from just six funders.
• The relationships between funders and between different funder collaborations is becoming increasingly important.

As well as reading the report, you can download the data and read about our methodology in our blog on ‘Analysing Specialist Legal Advice Providers funding: What can we see? What have we learnt?’.