Lord Low said: ‘Our report makes sobering reading and we are calling on political parties of all stripes to recognise the need to act before we reach crisis point. All around the country we found advice agencies buckling under the strain, and ordinary people left with nowhere to turn.’ Amanda Finlay, commission vice-chairperson and former legal services strategy director at the Ministry of Justice (MoJ), said: ‘In these days of austerity, we realise hard choices have to be made. But just cutting legal aid is not the answer. The problems still remain. We should follow the example of other countries which have reduced legal aid but recognised that help is still required, and invest in better information, advice and support.’

Among the report’s recommendations are a call for a national strategy for social welfare law advice; and the creation of a £100m implementation fund, with half the money coming from government and the rest from other sources (see ‘Summary of recommendations’ below).

The commission’s findings have already been welcomed by senior coalition and opposition politicians. Speaking at the launch of the report, Liberal Democrat peer Lord McNally praised the commission for offering constructive suggestions. ‘If you are willing to provide some of the solutions, you will find the doors of Whitehall open to you,’ he said.

Shadow justice minister Andy Slaughter MP described it as ‘an outstanding piece of work’. He suggested that its recommendations should influence future Labour Party policy. Lord Woolf, the former Lord Chief Justice, who wrote the foreword to the report, said that it ‘fulfills a very great need’, and that its recommendations, if implemented, ‘could be transforming’.

Publication of the report marks the beginning of the second phase of the commission’s work, which will take a two-pronged approach:

When people get into difficulty in their daily lives, as in the examples above, they need to get the right information and advice as early as possible. If this information and advice is not available, they could become unemployed, homeless or in debt, and not only will they suffer distress but the state will incur increased costs. Where legal support, whether in the form of legal help or legal representation, is also unavailable, the number of people who try to represent themselves will increase, and the courts and tribunals will have to adapt to deal with this increase in unadvised and unrepresented litigants. Likewise, when systems that are supposed to support people fail to function effectively, those individuals require extensive help, often including specialist legal skills, to have their needs met.

These are the consequences, intended or unintended, of the government’s civil legal aid changes in the Legal Aid, Sentencing and Punishment of Offenders (LASPO) Act 2012, involving a cut of £89m a year in legal aid for social welfare law, as well as the reductions in local authority funding of advice and legal support, estimated to be at least £40m a year by 2015. These cutbacks have destabilised and reduced the advice and legal support sector at a time of increased need. As a result, instead of saving money, the cuts are very likely to end up costing more elsewhere in the system.

The Low Commission was established in late 2012 by Legal Action Group and funded by a group of major trusts and foundations, as well as some corporate support, to develop a strategy for addressing these problems. Widespread concern about the impact of the changes and the lack of a strategy for addressing their consequences means our work has attracted extensive interest from across a wide spectrum. Over the past 12 months, we have heard from more than 250 organisations and individuals – in person and in writing – about their views on the future of social welfare law advice and legal support and their comments on our draft report. We have also met a further 400 people at wider meetings. Our report has been greatly assisted by all the comments and suggestions we have received during its preparation.

The commission recognises that these are changing times and the drive for austerity means that there are currently fewer resources than in the past. We are therefore seeking to develop a fresh approach, which involves measures to reduce the need for advice and legal support in the first place, while developing more cost-effective approaches to service provision, both centrally and locally, and drawing on a wider range of funding sources than hitherto. Some of the key principles underpinning our approach are:

Although this report is written in a time of austerity, it is also a time of innovation and rapid change in the provision of advice and legal services and in dispute resolution. New providers are moving into the legal services market as a result of the Legal Services Act 2007, and new technology is changing the way that many people seek information and interact with service providers. It is important that our strategy maximises the opportunities that these developments offer for those who have the resources, both financial and practical, to interact with them, so that the most resource-intensive, face-to-face help can be concentrated on those who need it most.

Our six overarching recommendations are as follows:

Urgent action is also required to address the application and funding problems arising from LASPO Act s10 on exceptional funding arrangements. These were intended to act as a safety net to guarantee the funding of cases that would ordinarily be out of scope for legal aid, but where either human rights or EU law require the provision of legal aid. The evidence to date is that these arrangements are not working.