Legal Aid Newsletter | December 2025
Welcome to your December 2025 edition of the Legal Aid newsletter from Resolution.
If you have any feedback from this newsletter, or would like our team to look into any issues for you, please email us.
LAA webinars coming up
The LAA has asked practitioners to send in questions in advance of the HUSY webinar taking place on Thursday 11 December.
Find out more and register for the webinar.
Look out for the monthly Family VHCC clinic session on 18 December.
LAA cyber incident information updates
Check the LAA cyber security incident page. This provides updates by topic. If you scroll down to the bottom and click ‘show all updates’, it gives brief descriptions of updates and when they were added.
Average Payment Scheme extension
To help providers and barristers who are unable to access CCMS to submit claims to a sufficient level to support their business, the LAA has announced that the Average Payment Scheme will continue until 12 January 2026, with final payments to be made on 19 January 2026.
The LAA says providers and barristers should resume submitting claims via CCMS and only use the average payment scheme if no other option is available.
CCMS availability
The LAA has announced that CCMS is now available from 07:00 to 21:30.
After 21:30, if you try to log into CCMS or have an active session, you will be redirected to the outage page. They recommend ensuring your work is saved prior to 21:30.
Please note this change is not in relation to the recent incident and is a business as usual change.
Claim monthly controlled work by 17 December
The LAA was hoping that the replacement for CWA (Submit a Bulk Claim – SaBC) would be ready this month. However, the launch has now been further delayed.
November Controlled Work, Crime Lower & Mediation claims will need to be submitted through the contingency process in order to receive payment on Monday 5 January 2026.
Resolution working for you – restoration of LAA digital systems
Members of the Resolution Legal Aid Committee attended a further meeting of the LAA’s Provider Efficiency Team (PET) on Wednesday 26 November, which focussed on the restoration of LAA digital systems and provided updates.
You may or may not have been able to log onto CCMS yet – we hope the below tips will be helpful.
Resolution working for you – recoupment of contingency payments
We have written to the LAA’s Deputy Director to raise concerns about the recoupment of contingency payments.
We explained that concern has been heightened as it appears HMRC is treating the contingency payments as VAT-able, even though no bills have been delivered. If this is confirmed, it means firms will have to pay VAT on the contingency payments and the bills they submit, and will have to wait a very long time before they can reclaim the VAT on the contingency payments as those are recouped. This will hit cash flow very hard.
We know HMRC is beyond the LAA’s control but we wanted to ensure they were aware of the issue.
Once again, we asked that recoupments should not start until firms have adequate cash flow from regular payments of POAs and bills. We pointed out this would not be until sometime in January at the earliest, and could be longer if there are further interruptions in CCMS performance.
Resolution working for you – compensation
Alongside the other representative bodies, we have been raising the question of compensation for the additional cost caused by the cyber incident and its aftermath.
The LAA has said there will not be a separate compensation scheme. If the outage means justified extra time on files, that can be claimed in the usual way. Any other costs will have to go through the ex gratia scheme.
Resolution working for you – Civil Contracts Consultative Group
Resolution represents members at these meetings. There were several important updates at its most recent meeting and we have collated them here.