Still going strong

“Bombed—lost everything”. That was how one London Citizens Advice bureau memorably recorded the nature of the legal problems for the newly dispossessed “streams” of clients approaching the nascent service. War was declared on 3 September 1939 and the first bureau opened its doors the next day.

Happy Birthday?

Citizens Advice was 70 years old last month. You don’t have to stretch the point to connect the urgent demand for such a service in its Blitz-era origins with that of today’s “credit crunch” Britain. Every day the network of 412 bureaux field 9,300 new debt and 8,000 new benefit problems. An increase of 27% and 22% respectively in the three months to the end of June compared with the same period last year.

Professor AL Goodhart provided a contemporary record of how the wartime experience effectively embedded a growing legal advice sector into our national psyche. The CAB network comprised over 1,000 bureaux by the time his 1945 book Legal Aid came out .

“It is hardly conceivable that these will now be closed after the war as they have shown how essential this service is to the poor,” Prof Goodhard notes. Likewise, it is inconceivable that ministers would want to downscale today’s network.

That said, many in the access to justice lobby suspected that recent legal aid policies—community legal advice centres (CLACs), fixed fees etc—were calculated to have just that result.

Changing times

But the mood has changed as the depth of the financial crisis has been revealed. The CLAC experiment appears to be on hold but not before Hull CAB—one of the oldest and largest in the network— lost out in the tender to the legal services newcomer A4E.

The movement received a boost when Alastair Darling in last November’s pre-budget report gave the service £10m to extend opening hours and, again, when ministers pledged to maintain the social welfare law budget last month.

The septugnarian service is having a renaissance and experiencing the kind of approvals ratings enjoyed by few British institutions with the possible exception of Joanne Lumley. David Harker, Citizens Advice’s chief exec, reckons the service has “96% public recognition and 82% of the public say they trust us”. 

Approach

Ordinary people feel comfortable going into their local CAB in a way that they’ll never feel approaching the traditional, fusty solicitors’ offices. Where else do today’s dispossessed turn? Law centres came to life at end of the radical 1960s. Sadly, the movement appears to have stalled with a network of 55 law centres.

Legal commentators talk excitedly about the “big bang” potential of the Legal Services Act 2007.

But the reality is that any new market entrants in this glitzy, exciting world of “Tesco Law” aren’t going to touch non-remunerative social welfare law with a very long bargepole. Instead, the fear is that they will embark upon an asset-stripping raid on the high street, snatching the lucrative volume work and dumping the rest.

Glimmer of hope

There is the odd glimmer of hope. The Co-op hasn’t ruled out moving into legal aid. Eddie Ryan, managing director of the Co-operative Legal Services, talks about his store “wrapping our arms about people who need our help”. “Legal services are a distress purchase or a purchase of necessity,” he has said. It remains to be seen how the retailer converts its current offering into something more meaningful.

Last month the Law Society called for those new providers lining up to take advantage of the alternative business structures under the Legal Services Act being somehow obliged to offer financial support to those firms providing access to justice.

Chancery Lane appears to be arguing that the private sector should step forward in a way that the legal profession up until now hasn’t—excluding, of course, that dedicated band of legal aid firms who have stood by their legally aided clients out of commitment and professional duty.

What bolstered Citizens Advice was the decision towards the end of the last conservative government to make legal aid available to non-solicitor organisations.

Now about 16% of total bureau funding comes from the Legal Services Commission (LSC). Some would argue that there are better ways of spending increasingly scarce legal aid resources than through a service delivered by a vast army of 15,000 volunteers.

Varying quality

Variable quality of advice has always been an issue for Citizens Advice. When David Harker joined the service 12 years ago there was—in his words—“no rigorous assessment of quality”. Now around 250 hours of training is required for the volunteer advisers and quality safeguards are in place.

So Citizens Advice’s success as a brand should be celebrated. But the flipside of that success is its evidence of market failure in the world of publicly-funded law. When the legal aid scheme was conceived by the Atlee government in 1949 around 80% of the population was going to be eligible. In the mid-1980s the figure was 63%; dropping to 50% by 2000; and less than one in three (29%) in 2007. Citizens Advice started out as emergency service in the war time and remains one today.

Jon Robins is a freelance journalist and co-author with Steve Hynes of The Justice Gap: Whatever happened to Legal Aid ?

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