Using quasi-experimental methods, this paper investigates the effects of reduced access to legal aid in social welfare cases. Focusing on the changes introduced by the 2012 LASPO Act, I document the impact on households' welfare and the escalation of their legal problems in terms of evictions, debt judgments and benefits appeals. This paper extends the analysis to health outcomes, housing market tensions and mortality, adopting a Marginal Value for Public Funds perpsective.

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 impact of legal support on improving households' housing and welfare outcomes.

This project explores how legal professionals providing advice in areas like housing, debt, and benefits act as navigators of the broader welfare system. Drawing on survey data from clients of a law centre, it examines how legal interventions shape access to support across multiple domains—such as housing, employment, immigration, and family services—beyond the immediate resolution of legal problems. 

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 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.