Criminal lawyers will be offered a ten-year contract when the next procurement process begins, the Legal Aid Agency (LAA) confirmed this week
Current contracts, which began in 2022, end on 30 September 2025. Bidding for the 2025 Standard Crime Contract will commence this September.
One of the changes announced is an extension of the maximum term to ten years. The LAA said it aims to give providers more certainty so they can take long-term decisions.
Law Society president Nick Emmerson said the majority of the changes introduced ‘should have a positive impact for our members’.
He said they will ‘only have to go through the bureaucracy and stress of a tender process once a decade. That stress will be reduced because a mistake in their application will simply mean they have to redo the application, rather than meaning they are locked out of the system for several years as is presently the case.’
