Understanding how the interplay of broad criminal justice policy, prosecution practice and defence response impacts on criminal defence costs is not easy, particularly on the limited statistical information available at the moment. There is a need for more research and modelling of costs drivers. This would almost certainly need to involve the detailed examination of historical case records of both prosecution and defence, more in-depth analysis of criminal justice statistics and costs data available to the DCA and LSC, and consideration and testing of predictive mechanisms for cost analysis. It also requires significant political will. It is easy to understand the desire of government to reform criminal justice policy, without properly funding the defence side of the equation. Supplier-induced demand provides a convenient political justification for so doing. But our analysis shows that the system itself creates significant demand: it has increased the number and seriousness of cases being processed through the police stations and the courts and it has probably increased the volume of work that needs to be done on those cases. At the moment those demands are being met out of the civil legal aid fund, reductions in profitability for private practitioners or, perhaps most worryingly, reductions in the quality of service being provided to defendants.

View the paper here