Legal Aid Newsletter | February 2026
Welcome to your February 2026 edition of the Legal Aid newsletter from Resolution.
We will continue to put any issues you’d like us to raise to the LAA. If you have any feedback from this newsletter, or would like our team to look into any problems you face, please email us.
Resolution working for you – LAA cyber incident
Members report that CCMS has been broadly stable since it was restored in mid-December. Working through the backlog of applications, amendments and bills is the main challenge facing the LAA and practitioners.
Members of Resolution’s Legal Aid Committee represented members at a meeting with the LAA in late January to put forward the following concerns:
- The LAA is slow to process anything not straightforward, eg means and merits assessments very slow, prior authority applications, amendments and transfer requests. Note: current processing dates are available on the LAA’s website.
- The upload and download process is very cumbersome and time consuming now that you have to use a two stage process.
- Members felt the lack of the ‘you have notifications emails’ and struggled with the sheer volume of notifications.
- Care certificates were not being discharged unless chased.
- Outcome codes are taking time to process.
- Counsel’s fee allocation is much slower than it used to be.
- Final bills are taking a long time to process.
- The high cost team are very slow.
- Everything takes that little bit longer which all adds up.
Resolution’s Legal Aid Committee has put together some top tips for submitting Civil Claims.
Tips from the Legal Aid Committee
Civil Apply
Feedback from members is that the Apply service is quicker than CCMS. Applicants who are prisoners, in the armed forces, self-employed, involved in running a business, such as in a partnership, as a company director or shareholder are excluded. The service can be used for:
- Domestic Abuse – excluding Domestic Abuse Protection Orders (DAPOs)
- Section 8
- Combined Domestic Abuse and Section 8 – excluding Domestic Abuse Protection Orders (DAPOs)
- Special Children Act.
Note: the request for NI number on SCA matters can be answered ‘No’. - Public Law Family
Resolution working for you – FOI request
The Legal Aid Committee is concerned that people facing relationship breakdown are not able to access legal aid in relation to finances. However, the LAA does not publish data in this level of detail.
Sion Williams has kindly submitted the following request for information under the Freedom of Information Act 2000 on behalf of the committee. We will keep you informed of the LAA’s response.
New fixer services
The LAA launched an updated Civil Application Fixer service and introduced a new Civil Contingency Fixer service on Monday 26 January.
They have replaced the previous email address [email protected].
There is no need to call the Customer Services Team – simply submit your request via the online form. They are operated by experienced caseworkers who will review your submission and resolve issues as quickly as possible.
More information can be found on Legal Aid Learning.
Civil Application Fixer
This service applies to merits/means decisions, prior authority decisions, exceptional and complex cases teams (including exceptional case funding (ECF) decisions). You should use Civil Application Fixer if:
- the initial decision made by the LAA was incorrect, or
- the decision failed to consider the information provided.
Civil Contingency Fixer
You should use the Civil Contingency Fixer if:
- coverage granted differs from contingency notifications or CCMS.
- an amendment is required but no certificate has been received via CCMS.
- coverage or party details are incorrect or missing.
LAA cyber incident information
This LAA web page explains how the LAA is treating work received during the contingency period. The LAA’s guide to contingency payment recoupments (including information about requesting a pause in recoupments) can be found here.
There is more information across the whole legal aid scheme, on the LAA’s 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. At the time of writing it was last updated on 27 January 2026.
See also the LAA’s FAQs page, that, too, was last updated on 27 January 2026.
Submit a Bulk Claim
The Submit a Bulk Claim (SaBC) service (replacing the old CWA system for controlled work) went live on 4 February.
You need to use SaBC to upload January submissions, by Tuesday 17 February. The LAA says this early deadline is to allow the processing time required to ensure payments are made on time at the start of March.
No further changes to the standard monthly deadline of the 20th are expected in 2026.
Monthly submissions via the contingency process ended on 20 January, and all future submissions must be via SaBC.
The SaBC service is available daily between 7am – 9:30pm. Users who have tried to submit outside of these times before might have had the error message ‘a technical error occurred’, accompanied by a failed submission. This error only occurs outside standard operating hours. The LAA advises that you should resubmit when the service opens.
Read more and view SaBC guidance
Need to update your details with the LAA?
Changes to lead office details, your LAA lead contact and novation documents should be sent to your Contract Manager. Updates to addresses and other contacts can be sent to provider records.
Government proposals on client account interest – Resolution’s response
The MoJ has proposed that firms would be required to use certain types of client account. Some 75% of the total interest generated on pooled client accounts, and 50% of the interest generated on individual client accounts would be sent to the government.
Resolution’s position is that Government should be funding the justice system and realistically investing in family and other legal aid to increase access to justice.
The consultation period has recently been extended to 9 March 2026 so there is still time for your firm to respond to the consultation if they have not already done so.
Other legal aid news – crime fee increases
Following the MoJ’s response to the consultation paper ‘Criminal Legal Aid: Proposals for Solicitor Fee Scheme Reform’, the statutory instrument introducing changes to the Litigators’ Graduated Fee Scheme (LGFS), has been laid and will come into effect for cases with a representation order dated on or after 3 March 2026:
The changes include:
- a fixed ratio of 65:75:100 between guilty plea, cracked trial, and trial basic fees
- an uplift to the basic fees for offence types E, F, G, H and I of approximately one third
- an increase of 10% for appeals work, against sentence or conviction from a magistrates’ court.
Crime practitioners have noted that these increases still fall short of the 15% increase across the board that Sir Christopher Bellamy identified as an urgent need in his 2021 independent review.