It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship for the first time, Ms Fovargue. I pay tribute to the hon. Member for Salford and Eccles (Rebecca Long Bailey) for calling this very important debate. I think we all agree on the importance of this subject. I pay tribute to colleagues for their words and to the hon. Member for Manchester, Gorton (Afzal Khan), who I enjoyed meeting as part of the engagement on the criminal legal aid review. In particular, I also wish to put on record my thanks to all the practitioners and everyone working in the courts in the north-west throughout the criminal justice system who helped us keep justice going during the pandemic. They were very challenging circumstances for all of them and particularly in the early months for those who were there face to face and in person, at a time when there was a great fear about the consequences of doing so.
To be clear, I believe that legal aid and legal advice play an incredibly important role in upholding justice and the rule of law, which are both vital tenets of our constitution. The hon. Member for Salford and Eccles spoke about the importance of legal aid in the context of democracy. Access to justice is a fundamental right, and the Government are committed to ensuring that everyone can get the timely support they need to access the justice system.
We usually spend around £1.7 billion annually on legal aid, which provides crucial support for the most vulnerable in society, ensuring that they can effectively access justice when they need to. While that amount was lower in 2020-21 due to the impact of the pandemic—after all, the number of cases being heard collapsed for several months—we put in place measures to support practitioners and are working to reduce the court backlog. We expect to have returned to an annual spend of more than £1.7 billion on legal aid by the end of the current financial year.
Legal aid services are delivered in England and Wales through solicitor firms; not-for-profit organisations, some of which we have heard about today, operating in Liverpool in particular; telephone operators; and barristers, most of whom are contracted by the Legal Aid Agency to do legal work. The LAA makes provision for legal aid services throughout England and Wales to ensure that individuals can access advice where they need it. It regularly monitors the provision of legal aid services in England and Wales. Where issues arise, it takes the necessary action to ensure that service provision reflects local need—for example, by merging duty schemes or conducting localised supplementary tender activity to ensure that appropriate provision is in place.
Before I turn to the wider actions we are taking on civil and criminal legal aid, I want to answer specific points raised in the debate. The hon. Members for Liverpool, Riverside (Kim Johnson), for Manchester, Gorton, for Birkenhead (Mick Whitley), and for Liverpool, Walton (Dan Carden) all referred to the courts’ backlog. Of course, that is incredibly important. I am the Minister responsible for court recovery. I understand the great anxiety out there. Cases have been taking a long time. We faced an extraordinary impact on the ability of courts to hear cases, particularly where there are juries in the criminal courts because of social distancing, but we are now recovering and are seeing a reduction in the backlog.
The hon. Member for Liverpool, Riverside spoke about funding for the backlog. We announced £477 million of additional funding in the spending review settlement primarily for Crown court recovery, which I think shows our commitment to addressing the backlog.