A mindless agenda?
Date: 30 July 2010
Authors: Jon Robins
Issue: Vol 160, Issue 7428
Categories: Opinion, Human rights
The government needs to engage with, not shun, vulnerable clients,
says Jon Robins
A recent study from the Legal Services Research Centre (LSRC) drawing on 831 interviews of people at Leicester, Hull, Gateshead, Derby and Portsmouth community legal advice centres (CLACs) makes for an interesting read. It’s a grim representation of a vulnerable sector of our society. Almost one third claimed to have a serious illness; more than four out of 10 suffered stress, depression or mental health problems; almost a third had no academic qualifications; and most had household incomes of under £15,000.
The report is one of four studies of CLACs and CLANs published recently by the LSRC. It seems a while ago that those unlovely acronyms (community legal advice centres and networks, in case you have forgotten) were seen by legal aid lawyers as the big threat to livelihoods.
Refresher course
Here’s a quick refresher for fading memories. The idea behind CLACs was for “jointly funded, face-to-face legal and advice services”, specialising in social welfare law, and bringing together disparate services in a one-stop shop—or “a souped up” law centre, as Roger Smith of Justice has put it. CLANs would operate in disparate rural communities.
Legal aid lawyers have had more pressing matters to deal with, however. At the time of writing, we’re still waiting for all the results from the bid round for civil legal aid contracts. The Legal Aid Practitioners Group has called the day of reckoning the sector’s “blackest day”. There is talk of redundancies as well as fear about clients going unrepresented.
Yet the days could get darker still. We read of Ken Clarke’s reported “enthusiasm” for slashing hundreds of millions of pounds from his department’s £8.7bn budget. The justice secretary won’t be looking to prisons or probation; instead, his sights are on legal aid because—borrowing a line regularly deployed by his New Labour predecessors —it’s the most expensive such scheme in the world.
Uncharted territory
We are moving into uncharted territory for legal aid. Steve Hynes, director of the Legal Action Group, reckons “the absolute nightmare scenario” of scrapping Legal Help (the non-specialist, initial advice) is a possibility. “That would leave legal aid as a rump system for children in danger of going into care or people who are accused of a crime,” he says.
Englightened thinking
As divisive as CLACs have been, the debate about their origins might come to be regarded as a high-point of enlightened thinking. It was an evidence-driven policy drawing on the Legal Services Research Centre’s 2006 influential Causes of Action paper. That research highlighted the phenomenon of “problem clusters” where problems are experienced “simultaneously or in sequence by the same person”—hardly news for advisers familiar with clients arriving with a plastic shopping bag full of unopened correspondence. In the new LSRC survey, clients valued the “ability to deal with all problems in one place” as the most important aspect of an advice centre (on a par with “not having to pay”).
The CLAC initiative has combined the best and worst of recent policy thinking on legal aid. The central idea (better local planning of services) was absolutely right and must remain a priority. However, a crude tendering process showed scant regard for existing providers and the wishes of locals.
One problem has been the local authorities, always the Commission’s somewhat flaky partner. As the LSRC notes the Commission is “dependent on local authority willingness to incur the significant costs and political risks” of a CLAC. This has resulted in trade-offs between “the use of competition…and the desire to protect the existing supplier base”.
End of the road?
A couple of years ago the last government was promising a major reconfiguration in the provision of social welfare law with up to 20 CLACs. It never happened. We only have six (Barking and Dagenham plus the other five) plus a couple of CLANs (East Riding and West Sussex). The whole initiative appears to have dramatically run out of steam, except curiously in our second city, Manchester, where a tender closed for a new CLAC closed only last week.
Richard Miller, the Law Society’s legal aid manager, is bewildered as why the LSC is so “gung-ho” about Manchester: “It’s guaranteed to wipe out some of the current key agencies. Then the [CLAC] will be charged with the task of reaching out to the people the earlier advice agencies were getting to. It’s spending a fortune to reinvent the wheel.”
The LSRC notes the “resource intensive” nature of developing a CLAC— just the cost of commissioning was £2.5m to £2.75m for one CLAC. It’s hard to see the coalition government viewing that as money well spent. According to James Sandbach, policy officer at Citizens Advice, the Manchester CLAC is “an example of where the planning hasn’t been great”. “Successful CLACSs are all about the LSC developing a good relationship with the local authority. That hasn’t happened,” he adds.
Whatever the future of CLACs, the aspiration behind them—integrated, seamless services for vulnerable clients—is admirable. If the new government is to have any kind of credible policy on legal aid it needs to engage with the needs of the clients and not just pursue a mindless agenda of cuts.
Jon Robins is a freelance journalist & director of the legal research company Jures which recently published Closing the Justice Gap.
Website: www.jures.co.uk
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