Key Statistics relating to legal aid and the provision of criminal defence services

• Total managed expenditure (the governments preferred measure of total public expenditure) for 2004-5 was £485 billion
• Legal Aid expenditure for 2004-2005 was £2.038 billion in 2004-5
• Legal Aid spending comprises 0.42% of total expenditure
• The number of solicitors’ offices providing criminal defence services has fallen from 3500 in April 2001 to 2651 in September 2005
• Since 1997, Labour has passed 365 Acts of Parliament and more than 32,000 statutory instruments.   In the last ten years, over 3,000 new criminal offences have been legislated.  Those were added to over 8,000 already in the law books
• When Mr Blair entered Downing Street there were 127,000 police officers.  The number of officers in England and Wales has now reached a record 143,000 plus 6,300 community support officers.
• In 1950 there were over 461,000 crimes recorded by the police. In 2004/05 there were over 10 times more, at 5.6 million.
• The government claims that crime is down, but the trouble with the British Crime Survey (“BCS”) is that it only covers about half the crime recorded by the police. It misses out murder, rape, drug crime, fraud, all crimes against under-16s, and all commercial crime, including the biggest of all, shoplifting.  It is right to say that crime is down from a peak in the mid-1990s and has now reached a plateau of about 10 times the rate in the 1950s, but violent crime is increasing steadily.
• Of the £173million wasted last year in magistrates’ courts, nearly £24million was due to the Crown Prosecution Service (but apparently the defence was responsible for more than half of all ineffective trials, most frequently where the defendant pleaded guilty).
• Since 1997 the prison population has risen by over 25%
• London has more police stations (222), Magistrates’ Courts (50) and Crown Courts (12) than anywhere else in the country
• London is the UK's largest city, with a population totalling 7,387,868
• From 2001, the LSC introduced contracting for services provided under the Criminal Defence Service and the number of contracts held by legal aid practices at 31 March each year is as follows:

The following table shows all shows the total number of offences for London compared to the rest of the country between April 2004 - March 2005 (these have been taken from the Home Office publication “Crime in England and Wales 2004/2005".

For more information relating to issues regarding the provision of London criminal defence services, please download our analysis of various consultation papers and official publications together with statistical data on Crime in London for the period 2004-2005.