This project explores how legal professionals providing advice in areas like housing, debt, and benefits act as navigators of the broader welfare system. Using the first pilot linkage of UK administrative benefits data with legal aid casework —tracking law centre clients and ML-matched controls over 24 months —combined with original survey data (n=300), I document how legal interventions generate sustained increases in benefit income and facilitate access to non-legal support across multiple domains, including housing, employment, immigration, and family services, beyond the immediate resolution of legal problems. The findings reveal legal aid's hidden role as an integrative node within the social safety net, with implications for understanding the full welfare costs of restricting access to justice. 

This project traces how shifting political-economic conditions have shaped legal aid in England and Wales. By reconstructing a long-run time series of national legal aid spending and tracing key legislative reforms, it places recent austerity cuts within a broader, non-linear history of state intervention in access to justice.

This project commissioned by the Legal Education Foundation explores how we can use administrative benefits data routinely processed by local authorities in the U.K. to capture the multifaceted impact of legal support on households' housing and welfare outcomes.

This project uses a newly constructed dataset of welfare advice providers in England to develop a typology of advice deserts and create small-area indicators of legal need. It examines how incorporating access to advice into standard deprivation indices could improve our understanding and prediction of civil justice hardships. 

In this collaborative project with Varsha Aithala, we are creating time series data on legal aid budgets to better understand the structure and drivers of legal aid provision. The ultimate objective is to map provision against needs, within and across counties, to highlight the depth of the justice gap.  This project currently covers two Indian states, England and Wales, the Netherlands, Germany, Sweden and France.

This £1.2mil NIHR-funded project uses a randomized controlled trial to test how letters addressing stigma, administrative hassle, and trust affect London pensioners’ benefits uptake, finances, and health outcomes (n=10, 000).

This project examines how AI can alleviate fiscal pressures in under-provisioned legal aid systems through a randomized field experiment equipping lawyers and compliance officers with an AI tool to reduce non-chargeable paperwork, assessing impacts on service quality and costs.