That is absolutely right. I will come on to a variant of that theme—the extent to which the law is having to bear the burden of bad laws and bad implementation of policy. We are seeing even more of that now than we were before.
In addition to the impact on law centres, we have also seen a fall in the number of providers across the piece, including a 60% fall in not-for-profit providers. I am sure that the Government did not want not-for-profits, with all their ability to lever in additional support from outside legal aid, to be a form of service that was reduced, yet absolutely inevitably and as was predicted, the not-for-profit sector has seen some of the deepest cuts.
As we heard, there has been a calamitous fall across the piece in new acts of assistance, with legal help matter starts down from 573,000 in 2012 to 140,000 in 2017, so we know that people who would previously have got legal assistance and representation are now not doing so. We have heard also about the kinds of areas of service where that has had an impact. What we have not heard yet is that this is happening in a context in which the demand and need for that kind of representation and advocacy is growing.
In terms of welfare, that is an absolute explicit consequence of the welfare reform legislation, the Welfare Reform Act 2012 and the changes to disability benefits, which have seen so many people losing their benefits. They have been making appeals against that, and winning those appeals in unprecedented numbers—at a level that clearly demonstrates the total inadequacy of the way in which disability policy has been drawn up—but those appeals are only being won where people have representation and advocacy. There is a difference in the success rate for people who are appealing against loss of benefits where they are represented and where they are not. It is deeply worrying that people with identical conditions and identical sets of circumstances may or may not be successful in maintaining or restoring their disability benefits depending on whether they live in an area where they are able to access advice and representation.
As people will not be surprised to know, another issue that is close to my heart, homelessness, is another factor. After many years in which homelessness fell, there has been a doubling of rough sleeping and a 50% increase in the number of families going into the homelessness system. Although that remains within scope, with the loss of providers and the pressure on the system, the demand for assistance is rising but the ability to provide is not.
Speakers this afternoon have talked about different groups of people who have fed evidence in to the debate. I am particularly grateful to Youth Access for its briefing. It wanted to draw attention to the predicament of young people, who experience many of the difficulties with the welfare system and housing on the same level as others, but who are particularly unlikely to be able to access help. Youth Access states that 84% of young people are left unaided in their search for legal representation. That too will have worsened post-LASPO.
It is unfashionable in this House to champion the cause of the lawyers who provide these services. We often hear about fat cat lawyers, or see the media representation of the tiny number of lawyers who have made a considerable amount of money through the legal aid system. The truth is that legal aid lawyers are in very challenging financial circumstances. They have not had a pay rise
for a very long time. Unless we are able to retain them and attract a new generation of lawyers into legal aid, the service available in some parts of the country will decline further. I saw another example today of areas of the country where nobody is bidding or competing for legal aid contracts in housing law, because they are simply not able to make money out of them.
In the debate in my name on the LASPO review a few weeks ago, I set out a more detailed critique of what has gone wrong since 2012, so I will not cover any more of those points now. The Minister was very courteous in her response and subsequently replied to some of the questions; she also attended a meeting of the all-party parliamentary group. I understand that she is not able to pre-empt the conclusions of the LASPO review today, but in that debate at the beginning of September I listened in vain for a sense of a real commitment to understanding the scale of the challenge that we face. I hope that today she will be able not just to tell us what money is going into the legal aid system—I think we already know that—but to convey a sense of her passion for wanting to address and redress the problems that so many people across the board are now telling her about.
What we are looking for, and what we hope we hear a commitment to today with the detail spelled out when we get the LASPO review, is a restoration of money for early help. Everybody understands the importance of early intervention and preventive services, so we want to get a commitment to putting money back into early help. We have specific and detailed proposals for improving eligibility, for simplifying and clarifying the rules on eligibility and for bringing certain areas back into scope. Family law is a particular area that we want to see restored, as well as criminal legal aid, which should include a proper recognition of the need to tackle the under-remuneration of criminal legal aid lawyers.
Access to justice is as fundamental to the functioning of a good society as services such as health and education, which we more often invoke when we talk about public services. Access to justice is now being deeply and dangerously undermined. We need not just warm words, but urgent and immediate action from the Minister.
2.56 pm