Access to Justice: Legal Aid, what the Justice Committee's report actually means for family mediation

Here is the position, in one line. This report confirms what family mediation has been saying for a year, and it does not fix it. MPs now agree the sector is in crisis. They have found no new money for it.

The House of Commons Justice Committee published its report, Access to Justice: Legal Aid, on 17 July 2026. It is the third legal aid report of this Parliament. What follows sets out what it found, what it means for mediation, how mediation compares with the rest of legal aid, and where that leaves families and the Trust.

What the report found

The Committee's picture of legal aid is bleak, and civil legal aid comes off worst. That is the part of the system that covers family cases and mediation.

Frozen eligibility thresholds have created what the Committee calls a justice gap. People earn too much to qualify for legal aid, but too little to pay a solicitor privately. Research cited in the report finds that 76% of single parents with one primary school age child now fall into it.

The report also examines criminal legal aid and other areas, which we come back to later for comparison. But it is civil and family provision where the sharpest findings, and the ones that matter most to us, actually sit.

The justice gap is family mediation's client base

The Committee does not draw this next connection itself, but it is hard to miss.

In its own words, at paragraph 57: “We have heard evidence that 76% of single parents with just one child in primary school would be caught in this gap”, too well off to qualify for legal aid, too poor to pay a solicitor privately.

The passporting rules that decide who counts as financially eligible are not mediation-specific either. Paragraph 65 defines passporting, the shortcut that assumes someone is eligible because they already receive Universal Credit, Income Support, income-based Jobseeker's Allowance or income-related Employment and Support Allowance, as a single system-wide rule. It applies identically whether a family is applying for legally aided mediation or legally aided representation, with capital still assessed separately in both cases.

That means the families the Committee says cannot afford a solicitor are, on the same rules, equally unlikely to qualify for a legally aided mediator either.

For a great many separating parents, that leaves paying privately for mediation, cheaper than a solicitor but still a cost many cannot easily find, a scheme like our own £500 mediation vouchers, or no professional help at all. The report separately records a 340% rise since 2012 in people seeking protective injunctions without a lawyer.

The justice gap is not a side issue for family mediation. For a great many families it is meant to be the answer to it, and the report's own numbers suggest that route is narrowing too.

What it says about mediation specifically

Family mediation gets its own, direct treatment. The report finds that legal aid clients wait longer for their first mediation meeting than people paying privately.

In the Committee's own words: “About a quarter of mediators who offer legal aid have stopped taking on new legal aid cases in the past year, and 55% say they envisage a point over the next year where they will have to do so.”

The number of mediators offering legal aid has halved since 2018, and most services run legal aid work at a loss.

Mediator Amy Rudd told the Committee: “Many of my clients are parents on low incomes, often already overwhelmed by their situation. Asking them to provide extensive financial paperwork at such a difficult time will put mediation out of reach for many of them.” She warned that removing passported benefits would make legally aided mediation “unviable altogether” for many of her clients.

What the Committee actually recommends

Recommendation 70 puts it plainly: “The government must commit to retaining ‘passporting’ for civil legal aid in relation to those state welfare payments which are currently passported.”

The Committee explains why at paragraph 68, recording that “many providers raised concerns that Universal Credit might be removed as a passported benefit, as suggested in the Means Test Review,” and warning that this would leave their legal aid contracts financially unviable.

Recommendation 105 goes further on capacity. The Ministry of Justice must confirm how it monitors whether there is enough legally aided mediation capacity to meet demand, and must “produce an assessment of the number of mediators it requires to deliver this vital service, and how it will arrest the consistent year-on-year decline in mediators offering legal aid.”

Tellingly, the Committee also notes that the Legal Aid Agency may not be properly monitoring mediator numbers at all, relying instead on office counts that overstate real capacity, since one mediator can cover several offices.

How mediation compares with the rest of legal aid

It is worth seeing where mediation sits against the rest of the system, because the same Committee looked at all of them in one report, and criminal legal aid is the clearest illustration of what a real government response looks like.

Criminal legal aid has had two increases that have actually happened since 2022: a 15% uplift and another £24 million in 2024. A further uplift of up to £92 million a year was still only a proposal at the time this report was published, consulted on in summer 2025 and not yet implemented, which the government says would take criminal solicitors to a 24% increase overall once it lands.

Recommendation 54 goes beyond money. It calls for an independent body, either the existing Criminal Legal Aid Advisory Board or a new one, to be put on a statutory footing and required to report annually to Parliament on legal aid rates.

That matters for mediation more than the money does. Criminal legal aid is on course for a standing body legally required to keep checking whether the system is working. Family mediation has nothing like it, and Recommendation 105 does not create one. It only asks the Ministry of Justice to check in on capacity once, because this Committee told it to.

Housing and immigration fees had also gone unchanged since 1996, but the government confirmed a combined £20 million a year for them on 1 December 2025, brought into force by statutory instrument on 22 December, the first real increase in nearly thirty years. Even so, the Committee still records a 57% gap between new asylum claims and new legal aid matters opened, and estimates that 63% of people cannot find an immigration legal aid provider in their area, proof that even a real increase does not close a real gap. That is worth remembering before assuming any future mediation fee rise would fix things on its own.

Family law fared worse in a different way. The 10% cut to civil legal aid fees in 2011 sat on top of the freeze since 1996 across civil work generally, mediation included, not family alone. What is specific to family is that private law work involving domestic abuse is described as almost universally loss-making, and the Committee's only recommendation there (135) is that a future family justice strategy “should include” fee uplifts, not that it will happen, which is close to where mediation already sits.

Mediation is not entirely absent from a fee recommendation. Paragraph 72 names it directly: “We heard evidence that legal aid work in areas including housing, family, mediation, and immigration and asylum is often loss-making.” Recommendation 80 then calls for “uplifting other civil legal aid fee schemes in line with housing and immigration increases” as “the minimum requirement to arrest the current lack of service provision.”

But that recommendation does not name mediation on its own. It is one general instruction covering every civil category left over once housing and immigration were dealt with, family law and community care and welfare benefits included, all competing for the same uplift. Nowhere does the report give mediation a dedicated fee recommendation the way it gives criminal legal aid a statutory board, or the way Recommendation 135 names family domestic abuse work specifically.

So it would overstate it to say mediation was refused a fee increase outright. The more precise statement is that mediation is the only one of these areas without a recommendation naming it specifically for fee movement. Its only named recommendation, 105, asks for capacity to be assessed and monitored, not for fees to move.

Does this open the door to more legal aid funding for mediation

Honestly, not in any way you can bank on. Mediation is swept into Recommendation 80's general call to uplift civil legal aid fees, since paragraph 72 names it directly among the loss-making categories. That is real, and it is more than nothing.

But it is also the weakest form a recommendation can take. It is not targeted at mediation, it sets no figure, and it competes with every other leftover civil category for the same pot. The only recommendation that names mediation specifically, 105, asks for capacity to be confirmed and assessed, not for fees to move.

No government response had been published at the time of writing. Responses are conventionally due within two months of a report, so one should follow shortly, and it will tell us far more than the report itself about whether the general fee recommendation, or anything else, actually reaches mediation.

How this compares with what we already knew

The Family Mediation Council published its own State of Family Mediation report in September 2025, nearly a year before this one. It found exactly the same picture: mediator numbers offering legal aid halved since 2018, a quarter stopped taking new cases, 55% expecting to stop, fees frozen for 25 years.

The Justice Committee has not uncovered anything new. It has added the weight of a cross party committee of MPs to numbers the sector had already published.

The Family Mediation Council's own response, welcoming the report while warning that legal aid is “becoming a right on paper rather than a service that families can actually access”, sums up the mood well. Relief that Parliament has caught up with what mediators have been saying for years, and frustration that nothing has changed yet for the families in front of them.

Where that leaves the Trust

We will take the recognition. Having a select committee of MPs put its name to the numbers we and others have been raising for years does add weight.

The specific instruction that the Ministry of Justice must assess mediator capacity is one we, and the wider sector through campaigns such as Mediation4All, will be holding government to.

But recognition is not funding, and a report is not a fee increase. Until legal aid rates for mediation move for the first time in three decades, we are in the same position we described a year ago, still offering the service, still doing it at a loss in real terms, and still relying on the goodwill of mediators who could earn more doing something else.

This report gives us another reason to keep making that case. It does not, on its own, give us reason to think the case has been won.