As the legal aid, sentencing and punishment of offenders bill returns to the House of Lords at committee stage, an independent report from a leading university reveals how the legal aid changes will incur new costs for the taxpayer by simply shifting the burden onto other parts of the public purse.

The King’s College London report ‘Unintended Consequences: the cost of the Government’s Legal Aid Reforms’ was commissioned by the Law Society because of the Ministry of Justice’s reluctance to publish estimates of the knock-on costs of its proposed changes to legal aid policy. Published on Monday, the report shows Read the full story