Droughts and Deserts: immigration legal aid in UK social policy

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High quality, free legal advice is critical for ensuring that people seeking asylum receive the protection they need; there is also a public interest in ensuring that any public service is cost-effective and of adequate quality. Legal aid practitioners and organisations are the only mechanism through which both of those interests can be met. My PhD research question was 'What is going on in the supply side of the market for asylum and immigration legal aid services?' The core projects for my post-doctoral work are to transition into the social policy field, using the insights from my research to influence policy and practice and taking them forward with further research.Numerous reviews have concluded that it is difficult to understand the relationships between cost, legal complexity, and quality in legal aid work, including the Carter Review of Legal Aid (2006), the Fundamental Legal Aid Review (commissioned in 2004 but never published:see Flood and Whyte 2006), Cape and Moorhead's report to the Legal Services Commission on drivers of demand (2005), the House of Commons Constitutional Affairs Select Committee (2007) and academic authors including socio-legal scholars (Moorhead 2004;Goriely 1998) and economists (Bevan, 1996;Gray et al 1999;Fenn et al 2007). My combination of social scientific and legal training enables me to apply concepts from economics and social policy to complex legal issues in a way which facilitates more robust and nuanced understanding of issues around demand, supply, quality and financial viability, which has been missing from these reviews of fragments of the system.In my PhD, I conceived the term 'advice drought' for areas where there appears to be adequate supply, but there is in fact a capacity crisis, arising in part because the Ministry of Justice and Legal Aid Agency have misunderstood demand and supply in this market. My PhD offers new models for understanding these concepts in context. At the same time, there is evidence that overall quality in the market is being driven down, creating a 'lemon market' (Akerlof 1970) which protects the market position of poor-quality providers and creates an explicit conflict between quality, financial viability and clients' access to advice. This application of the 'lemon market' metaphor to legal aid was another innovative element of my thesis and provides a clear explanation of the quality problems in legal aid, which the House of Commons Public Accounts Committee (2015) severely criticised the Legal Aid Agency for failing to understand.The fellowship will enable me to make the transition into a research career with a strong focus on influencing social policy, drawing together these skills. The first element of the fellowship will be working with a range of non-academic partners to enhance the impact of my research by disseminating the insights into the legal aid market through a 'horizontal', practice-focused network and using a Theory of Change approach to develop clear goals and pathways. This will mesh with the 'vertical' or policy-facing network which I am developing now through an advocacy project funded by Joseph Rowntree Charitable Trust.The second element is building a publication track record to disseminate the findings of my thesis, build up my academic network and consolidate my developing academic profile. The third element is a self-contained complementary research project comparing the existing findings with the position in Scotland, which operates a different legal aid regime within the same asylum legal system. This will contribute important new insights to the existing findings and also provide a solid foundation for further research applicable across mainland Britain.Each of these elements will feed into the fourth:funding applications for research grants including the ESRC's New Investigator scheme in order to take forward both my academic research career and this vital, but under-researched, area of social and economic policy.