Iresearch legal aid and access to legal advice and representation.

I recently held an ESRC New Investigator Grant for a three-year project called Social Welfare and Immigration Legal Aid: Mapping need, provision and accessibility. Working alongside the Access to Justice Foundation, I aimed to understand indicators of social welfare legal advice need, the availability of advice provision and barriers to provision across the whole UK. This expanded on my earlier work on immigration and asylum legal advice to develop an understanding of legal need and provision in civil legal aid more broadly. More information and a set of interactive legal aid maps are available at www.legalaidmapping.org.uk/map

I chaired a working group with JUSTICE (in 2024-25) looking at the Windrush Compensation Scheme, identifying exactly what lawyers do in those cases. The report, People Need Legal Help, shows how the long application form and guidance, the demands for detailed historic evidence and the Home Office's questioning of immigration status at every stage are incongruent with the lack of legal advice funding. This research illustrated exactly what lawyers provide that applicants were unable to do alone, through case file reviews and interviews.

I have updated the mapping of access to immigration legal advice in the UK. The first report, 'No Access to Justice' was published in 2022 and was the first piece of research to explore both provision and need for asylum and immigration legal advice, within and outside legal aid, across the whole UK. The 2025 edition, No Access to Justice 2, begins to build a time-series showing the severe deficits in access to advice and representation, keeping people in irregular status and putting lives at risk.

I worked together with the Legal Aid Practitioners' Group (LAPG) on a research project investigating the non-chargeable time which legal aid organisations' workers spend on both casework and non-casework tasks that are essential to the running of their legal aid cases or contracts, but for which they are not able to claim payment. The news item is available at LAPG research on the 'hidden costs' of delivering legal aid - LAPG

You can download the report here.

Other recent projects include:

Together with colleagues in the Schools of Global Studies and Education and Social Work, I worked with Brighton and Hove City Council to explore the current state of refugee and migrant welcome in the city and draw on examples from elsewhere in the UK and beyond, to make recommendations for ways forward in four 'streams': health, housing, education and access to legal advice. We produced a report called 'What does it mean to be a city of sanctuary?' This is feeding into the strategy for Brighton and Hove's application for Local Authority of Sanctuary status.

I recently completed a piece of research for the Justice Together Initiative to find out the extent of local authority funding of immigration legal advice in England and Wales, and to identify best practice examples. The report is available at https://justice-together.org.uk/articles/its-a-no-brainer-local-authority-funding-for-immigration-legal-advice-in-the-uk-a-report-by-jo-wilding-may-2023/

Research on the adequacy and availability of access to immigration legal advice for migrants in Wales, commissioned by the Welsh Government as part of the Migrant Integration Wales programme. https://www.gov.wales/adequacy-and-availability-immigration-legal-advice-forced-migrants-wales-executive-summary-html

Research on access to legal advice in the East of England region and the barriers to increasing provision, commissioned by the East of England Local Government Association.

The UK immigration advice mapping project, commissioned by Refugee Action and funded by the Paul Hamlyn Foundation and Community Justice Fund, to map demand and provision for immigration and asylum provision within and beyond legal aid, in each region and nation of the UK. This was the first piece of research to look at the whole UK, and the report is available at https://www.ragp.org.uk/reports

This followed on from a research project analysing access to immigration advice in London, commissioned by Paul Hamlyn Foundation to inform the grant-making work of the Justice Together Initiative, a coalition of major funders which is supporting immigration legal advice in all regions of the UK. The report, jointly written with Maureen Mguni and Travis Van Isacker, is available at
https://justice-together.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2021/06/A-Huge-Gulf-FINAL-report.pdf

My doctoral research was a case-study based investigation of the legal aid market in England and Wales, followed up with an ESRC-funded postdoctoral fellowship in which, among other projects, I carried out a follow-up study of the legal aid system and lawyers in Scotland. A book, ‘The Legal Aid Market’ was published by Policy Press in 2021 - https://policy.bristoluniversitypress.co.uk/the-legal-aid-market while a short, policy focused report for England and Wales, Droughts and Deserts, is available free at https://www.researchgate.net/publication/333718995_Droughts_and_Deserts_A_report_on_the_immigration_legal_aid_market

Previously I worked on the UK part of an EU-funded comparative study on the application of the ‘best interests principle’ in the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child (UNCRC) to children seeking asylum in Europe.

My research has appeared in a number of House of Commons Library briefings, and I have given written or live evidence to several Parliamentary Committee inquiries, including the Justice Select Committee enquiry on the future of legal aid, as well as the Westminster Commission on Legal Aid. I am a member of the Bar Council’s research peer review committee and the International Advisory Board for the Policy Press book series, Perspectives on Law and Access to Justice.