What drives demand? What drives supply? How can the two be made to match in a way that safeguards rights, dignity and the rule of law, and secures, as far as possible, value for money? The answers to these questions should form the bedrock of all legal aid policy and influence the design of asylum procedures. Without understanding demand, it is impossible to operationalise a market that protects availability and quality of services. Yet there is no clear framework for making sense of demand and supply in social welfare legal aid which, as Moorhead (2004) put it, is an obstacle to the development of solutions.

To address this problem, two main arguments are made here:

• • There are different kinds of demand. Any aspect or instance of demand for asylum legal services can be placed into a four-square matrix, which allows for exploration of the drivers of each type of demand and their impacts on cost.

• • The failure to build the market around demand in immigration legal aid has led to systems of payment and auditing which are poorly aligned with the drivers and consequences of demand, creating obstacles to high-quality provision responsive to that demand.

What do we already know about demand? Legal aid received little academic or policy attention until the early 1990s, when the managerialisation of public services was well underway and politicians began to view legal aid spending as out of control. Costs certainly rose significantly in this period and there was a drive to explain this. Much of the academic focus was on ‘devising sophisticated models based on simplistic and untested assumptions about how lawyers behave’ (Goriely, 1998:p14). One such model, the theory of ‘supplier-induced demand’ (SID), had real influence on legal aid policy making which continues to be felt today.

The theory suggests that lawyers supply excessive services when a third party is paying for the work, particularly when there is competition between lawyers for private clients, or other sources of income are reduced (Gray, 1994; Bevan, Holland & Partington, 1994; Bevan, 1996; Gray, Rickman & Fenn, 1999). The premise was that both the number of cases and the costs per case were increasing, and that this was likely down to professionals manipulating the payment system (see Wall, 1996), or characterising all problems as legal and claiming public money to solve them (Abel, 1986, 2003).