What is this research and why is it important?
This page contains reports that present a summary of the findings of the 2023 survey of the Legal Needs of Individuals (ILNS) in England and Wales. Specifically, it contains the first of a series of topic reports. This first topic report contains a detailed examination of unmet legal needs within England and Wales. It analyses which groups are more exposed to unmet legal needs and outlines what the main causes of unmet legal needs are. The ILNS is the largest legal needs survey ever run in England and Wales and is based upon data from 17,688 people, with this sample being comparable to the population of England and Wales. The survey covers 34 different legal issues, how legal consumers handle these issues along with their outcomes. This has allowed the LSB to conduct the most detailed investigation into unmet legal needs within England and Wales to date.
The ILNS is also the first study to use successive waves of research in this jurisdiction to use OECD guidance on how to develop legal needs surveys. It has continued important innovation by including measures of legal capability to profile the population by their experience and perceptions of the legal system. This allows the LSB to identify groups most likely to be unable to access justice and to lack legal confidence.
All relevant material can be found below:
- Summary report conducted by YouGov (PDF)
- Interactive dashboard
- The ILNS 2023 Dataset (csv)
- Data guide (csv)
Topic reports
What new information did this research provide?
In summary, this research shows that:
- Overall, 32% of people with a legal need were left with an unmet need. The main reason for this is that they did not manage to get professional help (20% of those with a legal need).
- There is variation in unmet legal needs by demographic characteristics:
- people whose day-to-day activities are limited by disability a lot are more likely to have an unmet legal need. This was mostly because they did not get professional help or found their issue took too long to resolve.
- females have slightly higher unmet legal needs than males (mainly because their legal issue took too long to resolve).
- people with household incomes of less than £32,000 a year and those living in areas of highest deprivation have higher levels of unmet legal need.
- There is also variation by level of knowledge and legal capability:
- not knowing where to get good information or advice and not understanding rights and responsibilities when first facing a legal issue are linked with having an unmet legal need (these are the biggest percentage point differences in question responses found in this survey).
- people who have low legal confidence or are assessed to be low in accessibility to justice are more likely to have an unmet legal need
- Unmet legal need is highest for family legal issues (40%) and lowest for injury issues (27%).
- The most common reason, for those with an unmet legal need, for not getting professional help was that they could not find someone able or willing to help.
How are we going to use this research?
The LSB will use this research to update the state of the legal services report, last published by the LSB four years ago. It will use its unmet legal needs research to assist our policy team and other regulatory bodies in better targeting those most at risk of developing unmet legal needs.
It will do this by helping such bodies to understand the groups most at risk of developing unmet legal needs and what the key causes behind this are. This will help the LSB and other bodies achieve their goals in tackling barriers to accessing justice.
We are also going to use this research to assist other researchers, such as academics, in conducting deeper research into barriers to accessing justice. This is being done by making the ILNS dataset publicly available with an accompanying data guide that will enable the full use of a dataset containing hundreds of variables (see the links at the top of this page). This dataset allows the comparison to the 2019 wave, again helping researchers to understand the changes to the legal services sector and barriers to accessing justice post-pandemic.