Alexa has a developing multi-disciplinary practice in social security, housing, prisons, and public law.
Before coming to the Bar, Alexa worked at Citizens Advice providing specialist debt advice and assisting clients with benefits and housing issues. She also worked for a mental health charity, assisting vulnerable clients with housing and benefits queries. Building on her previous charity advice work with clients in in-patient and community mental health care settings, she is experienced in working with vulnerable clients and adopts a trauma-informed approach throughout her work.
Alexa is care-experienced and an active campaigner for reform to the children’s social care system and for challenging the differential treatment that care experienced people face, including by strengthening their legal rights. She is also a Trustee of the Care Leavers Association.
Alexa has a developing expertise in social security and has experience of benefits appeals and public law challenges to benefits decisions.
Alexa has particular experience of cases concerning residence rights and entitlement to benefit. She is currently led by Tom Royston in a pending appeal before the Court of Appeal concerning whether a carer with pre-settled status had a qualifying right to reside for entitlement to Universal Credit as a self-sufficient person. During her pupillage, Alexa volunteered at Greater Manchester Law Centre where she provided advice and casework in benefits appeals, including in cases involving entitlement to UC and the right to reside of third country nationals.
She has also assisted in the following cases:
Alexa has a busy housing law practice and accepts instructions across the full spectrum of housing law. She regularly represents tenants in possession proceedings brought by private and social landlords at all stages and has experience of defending claims on the basis of public law, human rights, and discrimination under the Equality Act 2010. She also has experience of injunction applications brought under Anti-Social Behaviour, Crime and Policing Act 2014, committal applications, and disrepair cases (involving both claims and counterclaims). Her understanding of the social security system is particularly useful in her housing practice.
Alexa also has experience of acting for homeless applicants who seek to bring public law challenges and statutory appeals under Part VII Housing Act 1996, including by advising on applications for accommodation pending appeal pursuant to s.204A Housing Act 1996.
Alexa has a developing practice in prison law and regularly represents prisoners before the Parole Board. She has represented clients before the Parole Board in applications for release and progressive moves to open conditions and she regularly acts for lifers, IPP, and determinate sentence prisoners.
She also has experience of public law challenges in the context of prison law and recently appeared before the High Court in a successful judicial review concerning the Parole Board’s failure to convene an oral hearing in R (on the application of Taylor) v Parole Board and Secretary of State for Justice [2024] EWHC 1363 (Admin).
Alexa’s public law practice covers her core areas of practice. She is particularly interested in cases involving human rights and discrimination.
Liberty
Young Legal Aid Lawyers
The Haldane Society.
Alexa has written about the implications of SSWP v AT and Jwanczuk v SSWP in the context of social security law. Her note on ‘Universal Credit, transitional protection and temporary accommodation’ concerning SSWP v JA (2024) UKUT 52 (AAC) was featured on the Nearly Legal blog.
Alexa has published case summaries in the Journal of Social Security Law (JSSL) editions J.S.S.L. 2024, 31(1) and J.S.S.L. 2023, 30(3).
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