Ebbw Vale is an hour by train from Cardiff, a journey through the Welsh valleys that offers reminders of its industrial past: the redundant pithead at Cwm, the last deep mine in the area, to Ebbw Vale Parkway station on the site of the world-famous steelworks that once employed 13,000 but closed in 2002.

“You walk down the high street in Ebbw Vale and you see the boarded-up shops, testimony to a town that’s suffered greatly and changed out of all recognition over the last 20 years, and since the steelworks closed,” says local solicitor Glyn Maddocks.

At the local food bank, in the former magistrates court, I visited as part of a project run by Cardiff University looking at the impact of the government’s 2013 legal aid cuts on the threadbare and fraying safety net of advice agencies and what happens to people who fall through the gaps. Universal credit was rolled out last June. Sharon Morgan has complex benefit problems that need the attention of a legal aid social security law expert. Deductions are being taken from her benefits because of an advance made to cover the five-week wait for her first universal credit payment. She is also repaying child tax credit that was erroneously paid for eight weeks after the death of her young son from leukaemia. It is a loss of income that has tipped a grief-stricken family into crisis.“We live from day to day, hand-to-mouth,” says her mother. “People have helped but everyone’s in the same situation.”

In Ebbw Vale there are no legal aid lawyers, no Citizens Advice and no law centre. The Legal Aid, Sentencing and Punishment of Offenders Act (Laspo) slashed the legal aid budget in England and Wales by a third in April 2013. It removed £751m and swaths of legal advice from the legal aid scheme, including welfare benefits, housing (except where there is a risk of homelessness), employment, family law (unless there is evidence of domestic violence) and immigration. In Wales, there were 31 providers of publicly funded benefits advice: now there are three. Th

e number of firms providing legal aid has fallen by 29% compared with 20% in England.

The south Wales valleys are a legal aid advice desert. Few places in the UK are as overlooked as Ebbw Vale

The fragile advice sectorhas been hit by a doubly whammy of Laspo and local authority cuts. Before 2013, legal aid would typically account for 40% of a law centre’s income and 40% from local authorities. Since Laspo, the income of law centres has halved and 11 have been forced to close, leaving none in the whole of Wales and only 43 in England offering specialist advice for those who cannot afford to pay a lawyer.

The Law Society defines an advice desert as an area where advice is not available through legal aid or where there is only one provider locally. It reckons that almost a third of legal aid areas in England and Wales now have only one or no local legal aid housing advice providers at all.

Daniel Newman, a law lecturer based at Cardiff University working on its Laspo project, recently gave evidence to the Commission on Justice in Wales on advice deserts. “The south Wales valleys, rural and remote, are a legal aid advice desert. Few places in the UK are as overlooked as Ebbw Vale,” he says. Mid-Wales, the north-east and the Vale of Glamorgan could also be labelled deserts, he adds. “We’ve seen closures of law centres and Citizens Advice branches, and a reliance on small voluntary groups, often church-led, to try and fill the gaps. Laspo has been a disaster for those who would otherwise been helped, but what’s less understood is that it’s seriously damaged what remained of the advice sector by removing an income stream.” .

There are problems in England too. Bolton, in Greater Manchester, might not qualify as a legal advice desert: there are two providers with housing legal aid contracts, including Citizens Advice Bolton. Yet its chief executive, Richard Wilkinson, says the sector has been “decimated”. He says: “It’s “virtually impossible for someone to access specialist legal advice in social welfare law”.

I previously visited Bolton eight years ago, before the Laspo cuts. Its waiting room is as busy as it was then when Citizens Advice helped 14,000 people. In 2018 it helped 10,807.

“The numbers coming in mightn’t be dissimilar but what they get now is one-off advice,” Wilkinson says. “They don’t get deeper case work and they don’t get representation in courts or tribunals. People are disappearing through the cracks.”

Citizens Advice is a shadow of its former self. In 2011 it had 55 staff, now it has 24. “We had four funding sources, and 70% of income was from legal aid. Now we have half the income and five times the number of income streams, such as a £3,000 grant for an outreach project and £5,000 to work local schools.” Citizens Advice still has legal aid contracts for community care, housing, immigration and some benefits advice. Back in 2010, under its legal aid contract, the bureau had 1,700 cases for welfare benefits. “All gone,” says Wilkinson.

Closed shops in Ebbw Vale high street Photograph: Richard Jones/The Guardian

Suffolk Law Centre is a tiny oasis in a vast legal advice desert in this corner of East Anglia. “There isn’t a single housing lawyer in Suffolk. We haven’t had once since 2014,” says the director of legal services, Audrey Ludwig. The county’s image of rural prosperity disguises serious legal need. According to figures from the End Child Poverty campaign published last year, in two constituencies (Ipswich and Waveney) almost 30% of children are considered to be living in poverty.

The law centre was set up 12 months ago and was born out of the Ipswich and Suffolk Council for Racial Equality. A small team of 12 paid staff works across both charities, and the law centre draws on 100 volunteers, including local lawyers, to hold clinics in family, employment housing, immigration and personal injury advice.

According to Ludwig, the centre’s funding is “precarious”, coming from a range of project grants, with little core funding and no legal aid. “We are a sticking plaster,” he says. “We have waiting lists of several months.”

Last year the fledgling law centre won a legal aid contract for a much-needed housing lawyer. It was the only organisation to tender. The contract was conditional on the centre being able to recruit a supervising housing lawyer with three years’ experience. It has advertised three times but, so far, hasn’t been able to fill the post because so many experienced lawyers have left the field. “It’s a sad reflection of the state of sector,” says Ludwig.

Back in Ebbw Vale, Maddocks, who is a member of the Law Society’s human rights committee, reflects on the devastating impact the 2013 legal aid cuts have had on access to justice for ordinary people. But she adds: “The reality is that access to publicly funded legal advice has always been massively variable and provision patchy. There has never been much by way of legal aid in the valleys and the quality of that advice, often from one-man bands, hasn’t always been great. In the days of coal and steel, people were looked after by their own communities, through local groups and their unions. That’s all gone. There is nothing in its place.”

Last month the government belatedly published its five-year review of Laspo. As a result, it has promised £8m, mainly for IT, aimed at “making sure that people can access the right help”.

A Ministry of Justice spokesman says: “Every person should have access to legal advice when they need it – that’s why the Legal Aid Agency keeps availability under constant review and takes urgent action whenever it has concerns … Legal aid services are not set by local authority area so even where a local authority has no providers its residents will be covered by other providers nearby. There are now more law firm branches offering legal aid services than under the previous contracts.”

• Some names have been changed