30,000 Collapsed Cases: What the Forensic Science Crisis is Really Costing the Taxpayer

A cost analysis of the House of Lords Science and Technology Committee report on forensic science in England and Wales

TL;DR

Between October 2020 and September 2024, 30,000 prosecutions in England and Wales collapsed due to lost, missing, damaged, or insufficient evidence. A House of Lords committee report published in February 2026 describes the forensic science system behind this failure as a national scandal in the making. Here I attempt to calculate what those 30,000 cases cost the taxpayer, drawing on National Audit Office, Institute for Fiscal Studies, and Crown Prosecution Service cost data. The conservative direct estimate, covering CPS preparation costs, Crown Court sitting time, and a proportional share of Defendant’s Costs Orders paid to acquitted defendants, is approximately £71.5 million to £75.5 million across the four years. The true figure is almost certainly a multiple of that, once upstream cases that never reached the CPS are included, remand costs are accounted for, and the structural collapse of specialist forensic disciplines is factored in. Nobody in government knows the real number, and no member of the public does either.

The Number That Should Alarm Every Taxpayer

In February 2026, the House of Lords Science and Technology Committee published its report, Rebuilding Forensic Science for Criminal Justice: An Urgent Need [1]. It is a harrowing read.

The report follows up on the committee’s 2019 predecessor report and also draws on the findings of the Westminster Commission on Forensic Science, convened by the All Party Parliamentary Group on Miscarriages of Justice, which published its own substantial report, Forensic Science in England and Wales: Pulling Out of the Graveyard Spiral, in June 2025 [14]. Between them, these two bodies document a system that has been warned repeatedly about the same failures and has repeatedly failed to act on those warnings.

One statistic sits at the heart of this crisis. Between October 2020 and September 2024, 30,000 prosecutions in England and Wales collapsed. The cause, in each case, was lost, missing, damaged, or insufficient evidence [1]. That figure comes from an analysis conducted by the BBC and the University of Leicester, cited directly in the Lords report [13].

What do the failures of the current system actually cost the taxpayer? The answer requires careful construction, and almost certainly can never be truly known.

But even on the most conservative reading, the number is substantial. And crucially, the 30,000 figure itself is almost certainly a gross underestimate of the true scale of failure.

Understanding the 30,000 Figure: What It Is, and What It Is Not

Before reaching for a calculator, we need to understand the limitations of this headline number. The 30,000 cases are those classified by the Crown Prosecution Service under code E72, which denotes ‘insufficient evidence to proceed’ [1]. That classification does not exclusively mean that forensic evidence was physically lost or damaged.

The Lords report itself is candid about this. It notes the caveat that the E72 category does not necessarily imply evidence was always lost, and includes situations such as witnesses who decide not to testify after charges are filed [1]. Some portion of those 30,000 cases will have collapsed for reasons unrelated to the crisis in forensic science.

That said, there are strong grounds for treating 30,000 as a floor rather than a ceiling, for two reasons.

First, the Lords committee heard extensive evidence that evidence storage across the 43 police forces in England and Wales is chaotic, inconsistent, and in some cases simply inadequate. Katy Thorne KC, a barrister specialising in defence work, told the committee:

Have I had personal experience of important exhibits being lost or not stored in accordance with the guidelines? Yes, absolutely. That has happened many, many times. There is unfortunately a very great lack of standards and consistency across the country in relation to storage. [1]

She described one cold case in which an exhibit had been removed from storage and taken to a police officer’s home, where it was being used for training purposes [1]. This is not a system in which E72 classifications are predominantly explained by reluctant witnesses.

Second, and more importantly, the 30,000 figure captures only cases that reached the CPS, were charged, and then collapsed. It is entirely blind to a much larger upstream failure. That upstream problem deserves its own section.

The Invisible Failure: Cases That Never Reached the CPS at All

The 30,000 figure is not just an undercount caused by data classification issues. It is structurally incapable of capturing the true scale of forensic failure, because the failure begins upstream of any system that counts anything.

Consider what the data can and cannot see. E72 classifications record cases that reached the CPS, were charged, and then collapsed. They say nothing about cases that never progressed to a charging decision because the forensic evidence was never gathered, was inadequate from the start, or was lost before it could form the basis of a charge. Those cases are invisible in every dataset the government publishes. They have no E72 code because they never got that far.

The Lords report gives us three specific and evidenced windows into how large this invisible problem might be.

The Digital Backlog: A Directly Countable Subset

The report notes that there is a backlog of over 20,000 digital devices awaiting forensic analysis that has not shrunk in years [1]. The minister confirmed this figure in oral evidence [1]. Each of those devices represents at least one case in which digital evidence exists but has not been examined. These are not collapsed prosecutions. They are stalled or uninvestigated ones. The people whose phones or computers sit unanalysed in a police storage unit are not counted in the 30,000. They are not counted anywhere. Deputy Chief Constable Jayne Meir, the NPCC Digital Forensics Lead, told the committee that the number of devices awaiting review has been roughly static for years, meaning the backlog is not being cleared, merely maintained at a persistently high level [1].

This is a directly countable subset of the upstream invisible problem, and it alone runs to tens of thousands of cases.

The Postcode Lottery in Submission Policy

The report documents that submission policies, the decisions about which evidence gets sent for forensic analysis in the first place, vary wildly across the 43 police forces in England and Wales. Dr Des Vanhinsbergh of Key Forensic Services told the committee there was ‘a large variation between police forces. There is not a standardised submission policy across policing’ [1]. Professor Carole McCartney, a member of the Westminster Commission on Forensic Science [14], described ‘a real fragmentation around the country when it comes to what forensic services you can get, depending on the police force and who they have a contract with and what for’ [1].

The practical implication of this is stark. The same crime, committed in two different police force areas, has a materially different probability of generating usable forensic evidence depending purely on where it happened. Evidence that would be submitted for analysis in one force area will not be submitted in another. Charges that would follow in one area will not follow in another. Those uncharged cases are not in any dataset. They represent a real volume of justice failure that the 30,000 figure cannot see and will never capture.

The Permanent Loss of Specialist Disciplines

Perhaps most seriously, the report documents the near-collapse of entire specialist forensic disciplines. Marks and traces analysis, encompassing fibre analysis, glass and paint analysis, fingerprint analysis, and footprint analysis, has declined to the point where it is no longer commercially viable for providers to maintain [1]. Fibre analysis, which the committee notes was instrumental in solving the murder of Stephen Lawrence and the coastal path murders in Pembrokeshire, has declined from approximately 40 scientists to four or five [1]. Professor Angela Gallop told the committee that forensic ecology, forensic pathology, and other cross-disciplinary specialisms have been stripped away over the past two decades [1].

This matters for the upstream invisible problem in a specific way. When a specialist discipline no longer exists, or exists only in vestigial form, the value of the evidence it would have gathered is simply not understood. Even if evidence is gathered at the crime scene, it may not be submitted. The absence of a discipline does not show up as a collapsed prosecution or an unanalysed device. It shows up as an investigation that proceeds without a category of evidence that should have been there, producing either no charge, or worse, a prosecution built on an incomplete scientific investigation.

Professor McCartney put the consequence plainly:

I would put my life savings on the fact that, in future, we will undoubtedly have miscarriages of justice that we will not be able to solve, either because we do not have the expertise or because we do not have the evidence because we did not seize it in the first place. [1]

There is no reliable figure for how many cases sit in this invisible upstream category. The Lords report notes that ministers admitted they had ‘little visibility over spending and capacity across the forces’ [1], and the Home Office minister acknowledged that ‘we do not know how much money is spent, how many delays there are or the balance between the private sector and in-house’ [1]. A system that cannot account for its own failures cannot begin to count them.

For the purposes of this analysis, the calculation that follows uses 30,000 as the base figure, knowing that the true cost to the taxpayer of the forensic science crisis is almost certainly a multiple of the calculated cost. The 30,000 is merely where one part of the criminal justice system has started taking notice and started to count. The real failure starts much earlier and is not counted.

The Architecture of Cost: What Happens When a Prosecution Collapses

To calculate the cost of 30,000 collapsed cases, it helps to understand the layers of expenditure that the state has already committed to, by the time a case falls apart. Drawing on analysis by the National Audit Office and the Institute for Fiscal Studies [2] [3], there appear to be four primary cost layers.

Layer One: Crown Prosecution Service Preparation Costs

The CPS spends money preparing every case it takes on. When a case collapses before verdict, that preparation cost becomes a sunk cost with no public return. For a cracked trial in the magistrates’ court, the CPS preparation cost is approximately £400. For a cracked trial in the Crown Court, it is approximately £1,630 [5].

A cracked trial is one that ends on the day it was supposed to start, without the need for a jury to reach a verdict, because the defendant changes their plea or the prosecution withdraws the case [8]. A case collapsing due to lost or insufficient evidence is functionally equivalent to a cracked trial from a cost perspective: the preparation has been done, the court has been booked, and the state gets nothing back.

Layer Two: Court Sitting Time

Every day a Crown Court sits costs the taxpayer approximately £3,036 in direct judicial and operational costs, a figure that excludes corporate overheads [9]. The Crown Court ineffective trial rate reached 25% in 2024, compared to a pre-2020 norm of 15 to 17% [8]. Each ineffective trial represents a day of lost judicial capacity. When thousands of cases collapse, they do not disappear quietly. They consume courtroom time, they generate rescheduling costs, and they contribute directly to the backlog that now stands at approximately 75,000 Crown Court cases [6].

Layer Three: Legal Aid Defence Preparation Costs

The Legal Aid Agency funds defence preparation in most criminal cases. The NAO has calculated that in a single year, the LAA spent approximately £93.3 million on defence preparation for cases that did not proceed to trial [10]. This is a system-wide figure and cannot be cleanly attributed to forensic evidence failures alone. It is included here as context for the scale of wasted legal aid expenditure across the justice system.

Layer Four: Defendant’s Costs Orders

When a prosecution collapses and a defendant is acquitted or the case is discontinued, they may be entitled to a Defendant’s Costs Order (DCO), paid not by the CPS but from Central Funds, a separate budget administered by the Ministry of Justice [11]. Total DCO expenditure reached £55 million in 2022-23, a 31% year-on-year increase [10]. This layer of cost deserves significantly more attention than it typically receives, and a dedicated section below examines it in full.

Defendant’s Costs Orders: The Hidden Taxpayer Bill for Prosecution Failure

The Defendant’s Costs Order mechanism is one of the least discussed but most direct fiscal consequences of collapsed prosecutions. When the state brings a case and that case fails, the law recognises that an innocent person has been put through a prosecution and should, in principle, be restored to the financial position they would have been in had the prosecution not occurred [11] [12]. The DCO is the mechanism for doing this: the defendant’s legal costs are paid from Central Funds, a ring-fenced budget within the Ministry of Justice.

The scale of this expenditure is significant and growing rapidly. Total DCO payments from Central Funds reached £55 million in 2022-23, representing a 31% increase year on year [10]. That growth is not incidental. It reflects a system in which more prosecutions are failing, more defendants are being acquitted or having their cases discontinued, and more of them are successfully claiming their costs back from the state.

In the context of the 30,000 collapsed E72 cases, the DCO question is directly relevant. Each of those 30,000 cases involved a defendant against whom the prosecution was withdrawn. Many of those defendants, particularly those in the Crown Court who had retained private legal representation, would have been entitled to apply for a DCO. The amount recoverable depends on how the defence was funded and which court heard the case.

The LASPO Cap and Its Consequences

Here the picture becomes both fiscally and morally complex. Under the Legal Aid, Sentencing and Punishment of Offenders Act 2012 (LASPO) [16], privately funded defendants can only recover their costs at legal aid rates, even if their actual legal bills were substantially higher [10]. This cap, introduced as a cost-saving measure, creates a profound disparity between what innocent defendants actually spent defending themselves and what the state is prepared to reimburse.

For Crown Court cases, the position is even more restrictive. A privately funded defendant is only entitled to a DCO if they first applied for legal aid and were refused on financial grounds [11]. A defendant who was eligible for legal aid but chose to fund their own defence privately forfeits their right to any cost recovery upon acquittal [12]. The practical consequence of this rule is that it incentivises defendants, including those of substantial means, to submit legal aid applications purely to preserve their future DCO eligibility, adding unnecessary administrative burden to an already strained system.

The gap between actual defence costs and the legal aid rate at which they are reimbursed is not trivial. The Lords report reveals that the LAA currently pays defence forensic experts between £83 and £104 per hour depending on location, compared to more than £130 per hour that the Crown Prosecution Service pays for equivalent prosecution expertise [1]. A defendant who funds their own forensic defence expert, as many might in a serious case involving disputed scientific evidence, will incur costs at or above the CPS rate. They will be reimbursed, if at all, at the lower legal aid rate. The difference is an uncompensated private loss borne by a person whom the state has essentially failed.

What This Means for the 30,000 Cases

Attributing a precise share of the system-wide £55 million DCO expenditure to forensic evidence failures is not possible from the available data. The MoJ does not publish a breakdown of DCO payments by reason for acquittal or discontinuance. Wherever you look in the criminal justice system, it seems to be almost entirely data-blind.

However, a proportional estimate is possible, if only theoretically. The 30,000 E72 cases span a four-year period from October 2020 to September 2024 [1]. Annual DCO expenditure of £55 million in 2022-23 implies a four-year total in the region of £180 million to £220 million, allowing for the growth trend [10].

E72 discontinuances represent one category among many reasons for prosecution failure. If E72 collapses account for a conservative 10% of all DCO-eligible outcomes across the period, the implied DCO cost attributable to evidence failures alone would be in the range of £18 million to £22 million across the four years.

That 10% figure is an illustrative assumption, not a derived one. It has no direct evidential basis and is presented purely as a scenario. The true proportion could be lower or higher. What can be stated with confidence is that the DCO cost is real, it is growing rapidly, and it is a direct fiscal consequence of prosecution failures that includes those attributable to failures in forensic science.

The Injustice Behind the Numbers

The fundamental principle is that the costs of prosecutorial failure should be borne by the state, not by the individual who was wrongly or prematurely charged. The Lords committee is direct about this in its recommendations, calling on the Legal Aid Agency to urgently review its rates for forensic scientists and to ensure that at a minimum they are equivalent to the rates the prosecution pays [1]. The LASPO cap on DCO recovery [16] deserves equal scrutiny, though that falls well beyond the forensic science remit of this post.

Building the Estimate: Assumptions, Method, and Results

Here is a back-of-envelope cost estimate for the 30,000 collapsed cases using the cost data above. The assumptions are set out explicitly.

Assumption One: Court Tier Split

The 30,000 E72 cases span both the magistrates’ courts and the Crown Court. No breakdown by tier is publicly available for this specific category of collapsed case. The general distribution of criminal cases in England and Wales runs approximately 95% in magistrates’ courts and 5% in the Crown Court by volume, but E72 failures are perhaps more likely to cluster in the Crown Court because those are the more serious cases with the most forensic evidence dependence. This analysis uses a conservative 70/30 split: 21,000 magistrates’ court cases and 9,000 Crown Court cases. The reasoning behind 70/30 rather than the general 95/5 population split is that forensic-heavy cases, those most likely to collapse due to lost or insufficient scientific evidence, disproportionately involve serious offences that are tried in the Crown Court. If the true split is closer to 80/20 or 60/40, the resulting figure changes accordingly, and a range is provided below.

Assumption Two: Cost per Case

For magistrates’ court cases, this analysis applies the CPS cracked trial preparation cost of £400 [5], plus an estimated £150 for court sitting time proportional to a magistrates’ half-day hearing. Total per case: approximately £550.

For Crown Court cases, this analysis applies the CPS cracked trial preparation cost of £1,630 [5], plus £3,036 for a Crown Court sitting day [9]. Total per case: approximately £4,666.

Legal aid defence preparation costs are not applied at the per-case level because the available data is systemic rather than per-case. They are noted qualitatively as an additional burden.

The Calculation

21,000 magistrates’ court cases at £550 each: £11.55 million

9,000 Crown Court cases at £4,666 each: £42.0 million

Combined direct CPS and court cost estimate: approximately £53.5 million across the four-year period, or approximately £13.4 million per year.

Estimated DCO cost attributable to evidence failures (illustrative 10% scenario): approximately £18 million to £22 million across the four-year period.

Combined headline estimate including DCOs: approximately £71.5 million to £75.5 million across the four-year period.

Ranges

If the court tier split is adjusted to 80% magistrates / 20% Crown Court: £18.4m magistrates + £28.0m Crown Court = £46.4 million in direct costs before DCOs.

If the court tier split is adjusted to 60% magistrates / 40% Crown Court: £9.9m magistrates + £56.0m Crown Court = £65.9 million in direct costs before DCOs.

The range across plausible assumptions for direct CPS and court costs alone is therefore approximately £46 million to £66 million. Adding the illustrative DCO estimate of £18 million to £22 million produces a total range of approximately £64 million to £88 million for the four-year period.

What the Estimate Excludes

This estimate is conservative in several important respects, and the exclusions matter.

It excludes remand costs. Each of the 30,000 cases involved a defendant who had been charged. Some were held on remand while awaiting trial. The remand population in England and Wales exceeded 16,000 in 2023, the highest level in 50 years [7], at a cost of £51,724 per prison place per year [7]. Even a small proportion of the 30,000 defendants being held on remand before their case collapsed would add tens of millions of pounds to the total.

It excludes police investigation costs. Every one of the 30,000 cases required a police investigation before it reached the CPS. The cost of those investigations, including scene-of-crime work, officer time, and whatever forensic evidence was gathered before it was lost, is not captured here. These are sunk costs the taxpayer has already paid with no criminal justice outcome to show for them.

It excludes the private losses of defendants above the LASPO cap [16]. As discussed in the previous section, defendants who funded their own defence privately will in many cases have incurred costs far above the legal aid rate at which DCOs are capped. That uncompensated private loss is real but is not a direct taxpayer cost. It is a cost of prosecutorial failure shifted onto individuals by statute.

It excludes the upstream invisible cases, discussed in detail earlier. The 30,000 figure captures only cases that reached the CPS. The digital device backlog alone runs to over 20,000 cases [1]. The variation in submission policies across 43 forces means that an unknowable volume of potential prosecutions never materialised because the evidence was never gathered. The disappearance of specialist disciplines means entire categories of forensic evidence are simply no longer captured. None of this appears in any published figure.

It excludes the cost of wrongful convictions. A systematic analysis of misleading evidence in unsafe rulings in England and Wales, examining 218 unsafe rulings by the Court of Appeal over a seven-year period from January 2010 to December 2016, found that misleading forensic evidence accounted for approximately 32% of the misleading evidence in those cases [15]. A degraded forensic science system does not just collapse prosecutions. It also risks producing unsafe convictions. The cost of a wrongful conviction, including the Criminal Cases Review Commission process, appeals, compensation, and reputational damage to the justice system, is not included here.

Taking all of these exclusions together, the true taxpayer cost of the forensic science crisis over the period studied is materially higher than the £71.5 million to £75.5 million headline estimate. Plausibly, multiples higher. Nobody knows by how much.

The Fiscal Paradox: Cutting Forensic Science Costs Money

There is a fiscal paradox at the heart of this crisis. The closure of the Forensic Science Service in 2012 was driven by a desire to cut costs. The subsequent reduction in forensic science spending, the squeeze on commercial provider margins were all framed as efficiency measures. They were not efficient. They were deferred costs.

The broader justice system context makes this clear. The Ministry of Justice budget fell by approximately one third in real terms between 2007-08 and 2016-17 [3]. Per-person spending on justice was 24% lower in 2023-24 than in 2007-08 [3]. Had the MoJ budget grown in line with the average government department since 2007-08, it would have been approximately £4.5 billion higher in 2024-25 [3]. Instead, the system was cut to the point where it lacks the resilience to absorb procedural failures without incurring significant additional costs.

The consequence is visible in the court backlog, which stood at approximately 75,000 cases in late 2024, some 77% higher than at the end of 2019 [6]. Every collapsed prosecution contributes to that backlog, not by resolving a case but by consuming court time in rescheduling and case management. The ineffective trial rate in the Crown Court reached 25% in 2024 [8], and the total number of ineffective trials nearly doubled between 2019 and 2024 [6].

The remand population, those held in custody awaiting trial, exceeded 16,000 in 2023, the highest level in 50 years [7]. The state is spending approximately £827 million annually to house individuals who have not yet been convicted, primarily because the courts lack the capacity to hear their cases [7]. This is the downstream cost of a justice system that has been systematically underfunded and is now struggling to process the consequences.

Forensic science is one input into this system but it is an important one. The Lords report notes that specialist forensic disciplines such as marks and traces analysis are dying out because they are not commercially viable [1]. Fibre analysis, which was instrumental in solving the murder of Stephen Lawrence and the coastal path murders, has declined from approximately 40 scientists to four or five [1]. When these disciplines disappear, they take with them the ability to investigate certain categories of serious crime properly. The convictions that never happen, the offenders who remain at large, and the victims who receive no justice represent a cost to society that dwarfs the savings made by not funding forensic science adequately.

Conclusion: A Scandal in Slow Motion

The Lords committee describes the forensic science crisis as a national scandal in the making [1]. That language is carefully chosen. It is a scandal in the sense that the evidence of failure has been accumulating for more than a decade, warnings have been repeatedly issued and repeatedly ignored, and the costs are being paid by victims, defendants, and taxpayers while responsibility is diffused across institutions that each claim the problem belongs to someone else.

The committee’s concluding warning is worth quoting in full:

The Government recognises the system is in crisis, but argues in its White Paper that a crisis can also be an opportunity for bold reforms. It must urgently seize this moment to grip these problems. Otherwise, the next time this committee reports on this issue, it will no longer be a diagnosis but a post-mortem. [1]

The 30,000 collapsed cases are not a statistical abstraction. Each one represents a police investigation, a charging decision, a defendant, and in most cases a victim. Each one consumed taxpayer money at every stage. The conservative estimate in this analysis puts the direct cost to the public purse at approximately £71.5 million to £75.5 million over four years, once CPS preparation costs, court sitting time, and defendant cost orders are included.

The true figure, incorporating upstream investigation costs, remand expenditure, the social welfare, health and education costs required to support those who have been released after being on remand for years, the uncompensated private losses of acquitted defendants above the LASPO cap [16], and the invisible cases that never reached the CPS at all, is materially higher and probably cannot be truly calculated.

If the public knew just how much they were paying for a criminal justice system that fails to investigate crimes properly, fails to store exhibits properly, keeps people on remand for longer than necessary, and fails to compensate the innocent people it acquits, there would be far more outrage than there is. The Home Office minister told the Lords committee that she found it most shocking, as a new minister, that there was such a lack of real understanding of what was actually going on across the country on forensics [1]. A system that cannot measure its own failures will keep repeating them. Until that changes, the taxpayer will continue to fund a crisis that was entirely preventable and remains entirely unresolved.

References

[1] House of Lords Science and Technology Committee. Rebuilding Forensic Science for Criminal Justice: An Urgent Need. 3rd Report of Session 2024-26, HL Paper 256. Ordered to be printed 27 January 2026, published 17 February 2026. London: House of Lords, 2026.

[2] National Audit Office, An Overview of the Ministry of Justice for the New Parliament 2023-24 (2024);

[3] Institute for Fiscal Studies, Justice Spending in England and Wales (February 2025);

[4] National Audit Office, Efficiency in the Criminal Justice System (2016);

[5] Crown Prosecution Service, Costs: Annex 1;

[6] Institute for Fiscal Studies, Productivity in the Crown Court (2024);

[7] National Audit Office, Ambition to Reduce Crown Court Backlog No Longer Achievable (2024);

[8] HM Government, Criminal Court Statistics Quarterly: October to December 2024 (2025);

[9] Parliament, The Cost of the Prison System and Reoffending (written evidence, 2024);

[10] Legal Aid Statistics England and Wales Bulletin, January to March 2023 (GOV.UK, 2023);

[11] Geoffrey Miller Solicitors, Defendant’s Costs Order guidance;

[12] Olliers Solicitors, Defendant’s Costs Orders in the Crown Court.

[13] BBC and University of Leicester. Analysis of Crown Prosecution Service E72 classifications (insufficient evidence to proceed), October 2020 to September 2024. Reported in: BBC, ‘Thousands of Criminal Cases Collapsing Due to Missing or Lost Police Evidence’, 6 June 2025. Cited in House of Lords Science and Technology Committee [1], paragraph 131.

[14] Westminster Commission on Forensic Science (All Party Parliamentary Group on Miscarriages of Justice). Forensic Science in England and Wales: Pulling Out of the Graveyard Spiral. June 2025.

[15] Smit, N.J., Morgan, R.M., and Lagnado, D.A. ‘A Systematic Analysis of Misleading Evidence in Unsafe Rulings in England and Wales.’ Science and Justice, vol. 58, Issue 2 (2018). Available at: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1355030617301144

[16] Legal Aid, Sentencing and Punishment of Offenders Act 2012 (LASPO). UK Parliament. Provisions relevant to Defendant’s Costs Orders and recovery caps at legal aid rates for privately funded defendants.