We previously told you about amendments being made to the CDS (Funding) Order.

These amendments  come into force on 1 April 2012 and include:

• PPE to include digital pages of prosecution evidence
• Clarification of transfer scenarios under the LGFS
• Corrections and clarifications following the implementation of the 3 October 2011  recent Legal Aid Reforms

The amendment order can be found on the legislation website.

The MoJ and LSC are working with representative bodies to produce guidance to support these changes and this will be published shortly.

Revised rates for Advocates' Graduated Fee Scheme (AGFS) claims also come into force from 1 April 2012.

The revised rates were introduced by the Criminal Defence Service (Funding) (Amendment No 2) Order 2010.

The LSC has published online calculators for the revised rates on the AGFS pages of the LSC website. The calculators can be found in the "documents" section and are labelled "Calculators for Scheme 9".