Courts Minister Sarah Sackman has announced that criminal legal aid solicitors are set to receive up to £92 million extra a year.

This ‘multi-million pound investment’ aims to reduce the backlog in criminal courts and ensure that victims get ‘swift’ access to justice. Sarah Sackman stated that ‘justice delayed is justice denied’ and declared that this investment would be instrumental in restoring public confidence in the criminal justice system.

The majority of these changes are expected to come into force on 22 December 2025 and, once implemented completely, will result in criminal legal aid solicitors receiving ‘a 24% overall uplift in funding’ since the Criminal Legal Aid Independent Review (CLAIR) report in 2021.

The Law Society has responded that they welcome the investment, however, they revealed their disappointment in the choice by the government to not address the additional costs for out of hours work. They stated that, alongside this investment, the government ‘must implement regular annual cost of living increases or any benefits will be outweighed by inflation’.

This comes at the end of a challenging year for the legal aid sector following a cyber attack on the Legal Aid Agency in April 2025.  They discovered that sensitive personal information from over two million legal aid applicants had been accessed by hackers. The Agency’s online portal remained offline during this period which meant the processing of applications and payments was severely disrupted.

Chris Minnoch, the Chief Executive of the Legal Aid Practitioners Group, revealed the emotional toll that this took on lawyers awaiting payments, and that the legal aid scheme was ‘teetering on the precipice of collapse’.