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Most people in England and Wales believe legal aid for family cases was abolished in 2013. For solicitors handling an ordinary divorce, that is broadly right. For family mediation, it is wrong.
Legal aid for family mediation survived the Legal Aid, Sentencing and Punishment of Offenders Act 2012. It is means tested only. There is no merits test. There is no requirement to produce evidence of domestic abuse. The statutory charge does not apply, so nothing is recovered from any settlement reached. If one person qualifies, the other gets something too.
Very few consumer guides state all five of those points together, and the result is that people who qualify do not apply.
At the same time, the number of mediators willing to do publicly funded work has roughly halved since 2018, while demand has risen sharply. This article covers both halves: what the entitlement is, and whether there is anyone left to provide it.
The Legal Aid, Sentencing and Punishment of Offenders Act 2012, which took effect in April 2013, removed most private family law from the scope of legal aid. A solicitor can no longer generally be funded to handle a straightforward divorce or to negotiate a financial settlement.
Three things remained:
So the position is not that legal aid was abolished in family cases. It is that it was withdrawn from the adversarial route and kept for the non-court route.
For family mediation there is no merits test. The question is financial eligibility, not whether the case is strong.
The domestic abuse gateway evidence requirements, which are extensive and which many people find difficult to satisfy, apply to legal aid for a solicitor. They do not apply to legal aid for family mediation.
This distinction is frequently missed, and it deters people who assume they must prove something before they can apply.
In most areas of civil legal aid, the statutory charge allows the Legal Aid Agency to recover its costs from property or money recovered or preserved in the case. It is the reason legal aid is sometimes described as a loan rather than a grant.
It does not apply to legal aid for family mediation. Nothing is recovered from a settlement reached in publicly funded family mediation.
This is the least known rule and the most useful.
Where one person is financially eligible and the other is not, the eligible person pays nothing. The person who is not eligible still receives their assessment meeting free of charge, and the first joint session is covered.
Beyond that first session the ineligible person pays privately, though in cases about children they may also be able to use the family mediation voucher, which contributes up to £500.
Eligibility is assessed against the Legal Aid Agency's eligibility keycard. Keycard 62, effective April 2026, sets out the limits below.
| Test | Limit |
|---|---|
| Gross monthly income | £2,657 |
| Disposable monthly income | £733 |
| Disposable capital | £8,000 |
| Additional allowance for each dependent child beyond the fourth | £222 per month |
These figures are revised periodically and should always be checked against the current keycard.
Gross income is assessed first. Above the gross limit there is no eligibility regardless of outgoings. Below it, allowances are deducted for tax, national insurance, dependants and certain fixed costs to arrive at disposable income.
Receipt of certain benefits passports an applicant through the income test. These are Universal Credit, Income Support, income-based Jobseeker's Allowance, income-related Employment and Support Allowance, and the Guarantee Credit element of Pension Credit.
Passporting clears the income test only. The capital test still applies. This catches people out: someone on Universal Credit with savings above the capital limit is not eligible.
Capital includes savings, investments and equity in property. Two disregards matter most in family cases: an allowance of up to £100,000 against a mortgage on the main home, and a separate disregard of up to £100,000 for the value of property that is the subject of the dispute.
The second of those is the reason people who own a house can still qualify. The equity in the disputed home does not automatically disqualify them.
A partner's income and capital are normally aggregated with the applicant's. There is an important exception: the person on the other side of the mediation is assessed separately. A separating couple are not assessed as one household.
| Item | Covered |
|---|---|
| Assessment meeting, the MIAM | Yes |
| All joint mediation sessions | Yes |
| The written outcome documents, such as a parenting plan, Memorandum of Understanding or Open Financial Statement | Yes |
| Signing a court form where one is needed | Yes |
| Solicitor advice on what is being agreed, and converting it into a consent order, under Legal Help in connection with mediation | Sometimes, subject to separate assessment |
| A solicitor to negotiate a financial settlement in an ordinary case | No |
| The court fee for a divorce application | No, but Help with Fees is a separate scheme |
Because eligibility is purely financial, the evidence required is purely financial. There is no statement to write and no case to argue.
Typically required:
Mediate UK, a Family Mediation Council registered provider holding a Legal Aid Agency contract, publishes anonymised case studies stating that "All names and identifying details have been changed to protect client confidentiality. The disputes, the process followed, the number of sessions and the fees paid are all genuine."
One of them shows what full funding looks like in practice.
Two parents, referred to as Aisha and Daniel, were an unmarried couple with two young children. There was no financial dispute. What they could not agree was how many nights the children spent in each home during term time, how holiday contact worked, and how handovers should be managed.
Both were financially eligible. They attended one assessment meeting each and three joint mediation sessions. The eligibility assessment took two weeks, and the whole matter concluded in seven weeks.
The cost to each parent was £0. The published private cost of the same package would have been £745 plus VAT each.
They left with a written parenting plan and did not apply for a court order. Among the practical points agreed was that handovers would take place in a supermarket car park, which is the kind of detail that resolves a recurring flashpoint and which no court order would ordinarily specify.
The entitlement exists. Exercising it is becoming harder.
The Family Mediation Council reported in The State of Family Mediation 2025, published in September 2025, that the number of mediators offering legal aid has fallen consistently since 2018.
| Year | Mediators offering legal aid |
|---|---|
| 2018 | 450 |
| 2019 | 410 |
| 2020 | 375 |
| 2021 | 331 |
| 2022 | 303 |
| 2023 | 288 |
| 2024 | 253 |
| 2025 | 238 |
That is a fall of 47 per cent in seven years. The same report records that only 86 legal aid mediation services remained across England and Wales in 2025, and that 55 per cent of the remaining providers expected to stop taking new legal aid cases within a year.
Over the same period the volume of publicly funded mediation has risen. The Family Mediation Council reported 12,837 legal aid MIAMs and 9,841 legal aid mediation starts in 2024 to 2025, the latter up 37.4 per cent on the 7,162 recorded in 2023 to 2024.
Rising demand into falling supply produces a simple arithmetic result.
| Year | Mediation starts | Mediators offering legal aid | Starts per mediator |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2023 to 2024 | 7,162 | 253 (2024 figure) | About 28 |
| 2024 to 2025 | 9,841 | 238 (2025 figure) | About 41 |
The calculation is rough, because the mediator counts are point-in-time register figures and the case counts are financial year totals, but the direction is not in doubt. The workload per remaining legal aid mediator rose by roughly half in a single year.
The most recent Legal Aid Statistics bulletin for January to March 2026 reports family mediation starts as not currently available, following a cyber attack on Legal Aid Agency systems in May 2025. MIAM volumes were reported as up 2 per cent year on year, and mediation outcomes up 8 per cent, sitting at around half of pre-2013 levels.
Anyone quoting current quarterly figures for legal aid mediation starts should check whether that series has resumed.
Three practical points.
First, the Family Mediation Council maintains a public register of registered mediators which can be filtered, and the Legal Aid Agency publishes a directory of contracted providers. A provider holding a contract can assess eligibility itself rather than referring the applicant elsewhere.
Second, legal aid mediation can be conducted online. Geography is less of a constraint than it used to be, so the nearest provider is not necessarily the only option.
Third, if legal aid is not available, the family mediation voucher scheme contributes up to £500 per family towards mediation on children's issues and is not means tested. It does not cover the assessment meeting itself.
The Ministry of Justice's Family Mediation Voucher Scheme Analysis, published in March 2023, examined 7,214 families and found that 69 per cent resolved their issues away from court, or needed only a consent order. Within that, cases where one party was on legal aid reached agreement in 70 per cent of instances, marginally above the overall rate.
The Family Mediation Council reports a cumulative success rate of 61.75 per cent for legally aided mediation across the period 2013 to 2014 through 2024 to 2025.
These are different measures over different periods and should not be combined, but both point the same way: publicly funded mediation resolves the majority of the cases it takes.
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