Online survey of individuals’ handling of legal issues in England and Wales 2023
Why is this research important?
This research tells us how frequently people experience different legal issues. It also tells us how people handle those issues and if and how they get the help they need. These measures of access to justice tell us how we and the legal services regulators are progressing towards the regulatory objectives. Including improving access to justice, increasing understanding of citizens’ rights and responsibilities and promoting competition amongst legal services providers. It also provides us measures on some of the challenges identified in the Reshaping Legal Services Strategy. Including lowering unmet legal need, achieving fairer outcomes for people experiencing greater disadvantage and empowering consumers to get high quality and affordable services.
This survey of 17,668 online responses and a further 500 offline responses from adults based in England and Wales, collected between October and December 2023. The survey asked participants which of 34 different legal issues they had experienced. Then how they had responded to it, what help they had received and how the issue had concluded.
This survey is a joint project with the Law Society. We are continuing to analyse the dataset and will be producing separate topic reports. The summary report is available in the link below:
Key findings:
- Overall two thirds (66%) of adults based in England and Wales have experienced at least one legal issue between 2019 and 2023
- This includes 57% who have experienced at least one contentious legal issue, these are more likely to involve a court or tribunal process
- 12% of those with a legal issue told us that it was caused by the Covid-19 pandemic and 15% that their issue was caused by increasing cost of living
- 23% said that the pandemic and 26% said that the increasing cost of living had made their issue worse
- 52% with an issue got expert help, 11% got non-professional help (mainly from friends or family), 38% did not get help;
- Of those that did not get help a fifth (20%) didn’t think that anyone provides help for the type of issue they were experiencing
- Of those that did get expert help 19% told us they used a solicitor, 10% said that their doctor was their main source of help
- When thinking about anything they wish they had done differently in response to the legal issue they faced, 20% wished that they had acted sooner and 11% wished they have got information or assistance sooner
- When asked what would help 41% said using plain language that is easy to understand
- 32% of adults with a contentious legal issue that had concluded had an estimated unmet legal need
- Most commonly (20%) because they did not get expert help
How are we going to use this research?
We use the statistics on unmet legal needs, including by levels of legal capability, to indicate progress towards meeting the first two challenges in the Reshaping Legal Services Strategy. These are Lowering unmet need across large parts of society and Achieving fairer outcomes for people experiencing greater disadvantage. We also use the insights into what people do in response to a legal issue to inform our regulatory policy thinking. Finally, we also share the insights and dataset with stakeholders for a range of purposes. For example, for the first time, we have disaggregated data for Wales, giving a more detail on how issues and needs compare across the country.