The Dutch civil legal aid model for triaging cases, reducing bureaucracy by trusting providers and building “360-degree feedback loops” could help in England and Wales, the Ministry of Justice has been told.

The government’s Open Innovations Team (OIT) singled it out in an international study of civil legal aid systems commissioned to inform the Ministry of Justice’s (MoJ) ongoing civil legal aid review.

The OIT said the Dutch system’s tiered approach could help it “target legal aid resources effectively”.

A cross-government unit that works with external experts to generate “analysis, ideas and options”, the OIT conducted a literature review on civil legal aid in England and Wales and six other legal systems – the Netherlands, USA, Canada, Australia, Finland and Scotland – and interviewed 45 experts.

It found that the Dutch model for “identifying, triaging and prioritizing cases” was “consistently identified as an exemplar”.

The first tier in terms of civil legal aid is the Rechtwijzer (Roadmap to Justice) website, set up by the Dutch Legal Aid Board in 2007, which offers online self-help, information and support.

The second tier is made up of legal services ‘counters’, where citizens clarify their legal matters with lawyers or paralegals in person, on the phone or using email. Private lawyers and mediators make up the third tier, providing legally aided advice and representation for more complex cases.

The OIT said this approach could “help enable the MoJ’s vision for a justice system that supports people from the earliest point they begin to experience a legal problem and to target legal aid resources effectively”.

However, the risks were that self-help websites were “not always intuitive enough to diagnose a complex multifaceted problem for a user” and there was “a risk of referral fatigue as users are potentially