On 30 June 2009, the Legal Services Commission (LSC) announced its plans for civil law contracts. In contrast to criminal legal aid which is facing best value tendering (BVT) for police station and magistrates' court work, the plans for the next round of civil contracts due to start in April 2010 are less controversial. Crucial details though are missing from the consultation paper (Civil bid rounds for 2010 contracts: A consultation response) making the announcement and some firms and not-for-profit (NFP) organisations are still likely to lose out. Also, the threat of BVT for civil work still looms.
Civil bid rounds for 2010 contracts deals with the vexed question of providing services in all five areas of social welfare law. In a welcome move the LSC has backed off from insisting that it contracts only with single legal entities, but will allow solicitors and NFP agencies to form consortia with linked contracts to bid for work. Stand-alone contracts in housing will not be allowed and this will hit some specialist firms and NFPs. They can link, though, with another organisation undertaking welfare benefits and debt work. Housing firms also have the option of providing family work as well so that they can contract with the LSC.
The LSC is splitting the country into 134 procurement areas which will be designated as 'A' and 'B' areas. LAG understands that 'A' areas will tend to be relatively well-served, urban areas in which the LSC will expect contracting organisations to have integrated services. In a move that will cause problems for some firms, those undertaking family work in 'A' areas will have to provide both public law children and other family law services to qualify for a contract.
The LSC was also vague on how it would select between organisations if there were too many bids for a bundle of matter starts. Organisations’ financial status and capacity to undertake the work if they are granted the case starts seem certain to figure. Vacant case-worker posts at the time of bidding are likely to be frowned upon. Fuller details of the selection criteria will be given in September when the details of the bids are published.
Another unresolved issue is whether or not the LSC will seek to pilot BVT for civil work in the near future. It has left itself the option of announcing two or three pilot areas this September. Suppliers in these areas would only get a short-term contract prior to the process of allocating legal help work being open to BVT. The LSC seems cool on piloting civil BVT - perhaps it has too much on its plate with criminal BVT? LAG believes that the decision to go ahead or not rests ultimately with the government.
Wednesday, 1 July 2009
Wednesday, 24 June 2009
No win, no fee to end?
Much of the legal press picked up on the Conservative Shadow Justice Secretary Dominic Grieve’s comment at LAG’s ‘Legal aid at 60: bridging the justice gap’ conference earlier this month that if elected next May the Conservative party would decide to roll out best value tendering for police station and magistrates’ court work or ‘abandon it completely’. Less well reported were his comments on no-win, no-fee arrangements (NWNFA).
Grieve admitted that the Conservatives had first permitted such arrangements, but said that Labour’s Access to Justice Act 1999, which replaced personal injury in legal aid with no win, no fee ‘seriously went off the rails’. In a response to a question from solicitor Simon Foster about what the Conservatives would do about NWNFA if elected, Grieve said, ‘If I could see a way of removing no-win, no-fee agreements and introducing a contingency fund I would do it. I believe no win, no fee is a flawed system which has a gentle corrupting influence on the legal profession’.
In the last ten years there has been a large growth in personal injury cases funded in this way and to an extent they have succeeded in allowing many people who otherwise could not afford it to pursue their claims; but at a cost. Unregulated claims assessors were siphoning up to 20 per cent of a client’s compensation and there has been much complaint about shoddy work. The courts eventually ruled on the issue of the amounts the claims companies could charge and claims management regulation came into force in April 2007.
While it would seem then that the problems with claims companies have been largely resolved, the point remains that lawyers have a stake in the outcome of cases, leaving many clients without representation as their cases have merit but are either too complex or too risky to take on. Clients also might be advised to take settlements as lawyers do not want to risk losing in court. Grieve’s solution is a contingent legal aid fund (CLAF) and this is supported by the Bar Council and Citizens Advice, among others. Such a fund would be paid for by charging application fees and taking a percentage from the winnings in successful cases.
LAG has warned that such a system could not co-exist with NWNFA, as lawyers would cream off the better cases leaving those with less chance of success for the CLAF. It would seem Grieve believes this as well. The question is if he takes the reins of power next year at the Ministry of Justice does he have the determination to drive through the abolition of the current arrangements and replace them with a CLAF?
Grieve admitted that the Conservatives had first permitted such arrangements, but said that Labour’s Access to Justice Act 1999, which replaced personal injury in legal aid with no win, no fee ‘seriously went off the rails’. In a response to a question from solicitor Simon Foster about what the Conservatives would do about NWNFA if elected, Grieve said, ‘If I could see a way of removing no-win, no-fee agreements and introducing a contingency fund I would do it. I believe no win, no fee is a flawed system which has a gentle corrupting influence on the legal profession’.
In the last ten years there has been a large growth in personal injury cases funded in this way and to an extent they have succeeded in allowing many people who otherwise could not afford it to pursue their claims; but at a cost. Unregulated claims assessors were siphoning up to 20 per cent of a client’s compensation and there has been much complaint about shoddy work. The courts eventually ruled on the issue of the amounts the claims companies could charge and claims management regulation came into force in April 2007.
While it would seem then that the problems with claims companies have been largely resolved, the point remains that lawyers have a stake in the outcome of cases, leaving many clients without representation as their cases have merit but are either too complex or too risky to take on. Clients also might be advised to take settlements as lawyers do not want to risk losing in court. Grieve’s solution is a contingent legal aid fund (CLAF) and this is supported by the Bar Council and Citizens Advice, among others. Such a fund would be paid for by charging application fees and taking a percentage from the winnings in successful cases.
LAG has warned that such a system could not co-exist with NWNFA, as lawyers would cream off the better cases leaving those with less chance of success for the CLAF. It would seem Grieve believes this as well. The question is if he takes the reins of power next year at the Ministry of Justice does he have the determination to drive through the abolition of the current arrangements and replace them with a CLAF?
Friday, 5 June 2009
Proper evaluation of BVT 'vital' says Tory shadow
An All Party Parliamentary Group on Legal Aid was launched at a meeting in the House of Commons last Tuesday (2nd June). A packed meeting was chaired by Karen Buck MP who will also chair the group which aims 'to promote parliamentary and public understanding of the importance of the role of publicly-funded legal services as a pillar of the welfare state and in reducing inequalities in society'.
Legal aid minister Lord Bach spoke at the meeting. Welcoming the establishment of the group, he said it would 'promote understanding of legal aid within parliament' but he warned that 'the legal aid system has got to be sustainable and help as many people as possible. This involves tough choices if we are to keep legal aid within budget'. This comment seemed to be aimed more at his shadow minister, Henry Bellingham MP who was sitting by him, than at the audience which was composed mainly of legal aid lawyers angry at government cut backs. Bach also reiterated his message about 'rebalancing money towards social welfare law as the legal aid system should be there for the people at the bottom of the pile. I don’t think it is practical to ask to double the budget'.
Roy Morgan, chairperson of the Legal Aid Practitioners Group (LAPG), argued that the move to reduce face to face advice in police stations would lead to miscarriages of justice. Morgan echoed the concerns of many in the room about best value tendering (BVT) for police station and magistrates' court work when he said: 'Why is this reform necessary now? Why not, as promised, have a pilot followed by an evaluation? Instead of just evaluating the tender process?' Interestingly, Morgan seemed conciliatory in tone towards Lord Bach, saying he believed he was listening to practitioners' concerns but the Legal Services Commission (LSC) was not.
Bellingham had said in his speech: 'It is vital that BVT has a proper evaluation.' Clearly then, the pressure is on the government from all sides to think again on BVT or at least carry out a proper evaluation before rolling it out. LAG’s conference next Thursday (11th June) will give an opportunity to question Lord Bach again and to hear from Shadow Justice Secretary Dominic Grieve about the Conservative party’s plans for legal aid (see:LAG's website for more information on the conference).
There were many good contributions from the floor at the meeting from practitioners including Kat Craig from Young Legal Aid Lawyers (YLAL) who complained about there being 'so little to show for answering every consultation from the LSC'. In her view 'the current system does not allow for quality work'. Many speakers also paid tribute to the work of LAPG and YLAL in establishing the group.
LAG believes the group will act as an important conduit for informing MPs about developments in the legal aid world. LAPG and YLAL deserve much praise for getting the initiative off the ground as does Karen Buck MP, who is a great campaigner on access to justice issues in parliament. We’d warn, though, that the group will lose any influence if it is perceived to be dominated by practitioners and their worries about the impact of legal aid changes on their incomes, instead of focusing on the concerns of clients.
Legal aid minister Lord Bach spoke at the meeting. Welcoming the establishment of the group, he said it would 'promote understanding of legal aid within parliament' but he warned that 'the legal aid system has got to be sustainable and help as many people as possible. This involves tough choices if we are to keep legal aid within budget'. This comment seemed to be aimed more at his shadow minister, Henry Bellingham MP who was sitting by him, than at the audience which was composed mainly of legal aid lawyers angry at government cut backs. Bach also reiterated his message about 'rebalancing money towards social welfare law as the legal aid system should be there for the people at the bottom of the pile. I don’t think it is practical to ask to double the budget'.
Roy Morgan, chairperson of the Legal Aid Practitioners Group (LAPG), argued that the move to reduce face to face advice in police stations would lead to miscarriages of justice. Morgan echoed the concerns of many in the room about best value tendering (BVT) for police station and magistrates' court work when he said: 'Why is this reform necessary now? Why not, as promised, have a pilot followed by an evaluation? Instead of just evaluating the tender process?' Interestingly, Morgan seemed conciliatory in tone towards Lord Bach, saying he believed he was listening to practitioners' concerns but the Legal Services Commission (LSC) was not.
Bellingham had said in his speech: 'It is vital that BVT has a proper evaluation.' Clearly then, the pressure is on the government from all sides to think again on BVT or at least carry out a proper evaluation before rolling it out. LAG’s conference next Thursday (11th June) will give an opportunity to question Lord Bach again and to hear from Shadow Justice Secretary Dominic Grieve about the Conservative party’s plans for legal aid (see:LAG's website for more information on the conference).
There were many good contributions from the floor at the meeting from practitioners including Kat Craig from Young Legal Aid Lawyers (YLAL) who complained about there being 'so little to show for answering every consultation from the LSC'. In her view 'the current system does not allow for quality work'. Many speakers also paid tribute to the work of LAPG and YLAL in establishing the group.
LAG believes the group will act as an important conduit for informing MPs about developments in the legal aid world. LAPG and YLAL deserve much praise for getting the initiative off the ground as does Karen Buck MP, who is a great campaigner on access to justice issues in parliament. We’d warn, though, that the group will lose any influence if it is perceived to be dominated by practitioners and their worries about the impact of legal aid changes on their incomes, instead of focusing on the concerns of clients.
Monday, 1 June 2009
Reports from the audit trail … Number 3
On a wet Friday night last month some 200 residents of Peacehaven, a few miles down the south coast from Brighton and Hove, met at the Meridian Centre. They were in the community hall to hear an update on a last-ditch legal attempt to block the development of a controversial £300 million waste treatment plant.
According to John Hodgson, who leads a protest group known collectively as PROUD (or Peacehaven Residents Opposed to Urban Development), the site is going to be ‘the size of 17 football pitches’. ‘It is an industrial process and we don’t want it,’ he says. The plan is for the treatment plant to be sited in his town and on the edge of the South Downs, recently designated a national park. Southern Water expects it to handle 95 million litres of waste generated by 250,000 people every day, most of whom live in Brighton. The plan also includes a proposal for an 11km tunnel, eight feet in diameter, running from Brighton to the new site and passing directly under Peacehaven homes. ‘There is a burning resentment that the city of Brighton and Hove is literally tipping its rubbish over its neighbour’s wall,’ says Hodgson.
You can see a video-film about their fight – inelegantly dubbed ‘the battle of Poohaven’ by the Brighton Argus – as part of the Guardian’s 'Justice gap' series which is based on LAG's Access to Justice Audit (see:www.guardian.co.uk/money/series/the-justice-gap). Unfortunately (at least as far as those residents of Peacehaven are concerned), their attempt to challenge the development after a five-year campaign failed shortly after the film was shot. The High Court last month refused to grant them permission to judicially review East Sussex County Council’s decision to allow Southern Water to develop the site. The residents’ legal fight was backed by legal aid (although they had to pay a £5,000 contribution) but it was the threat of legal costs that prevented them challenging that refusal. ‘Our lawyers advised us there was no more legal aid available - so if we’d lost we would face the costs,’ Hodgson said later. ‘And they could have been as much as £50,000. We couldn’t afford that.’
Whether you characterise the actions of Peacehaven residents as NIMBYism (as some Guardian bloggers have) or not, the role of public funding in allowing locals to challenge the seemingly unstoppable combined might of ministers and developers urgently needs to be examined. It is not an area of our cash-strapped legal aid system that has been looked at despite a widespread concern about the lack of local accountability in the planning system. If the planning system fails communities, they are led to believe that there are always the courts. It is not as simple as that.
Even if campaigners are supported by legal aid – and that is a big ‘if’ - legal costs are routinely deployed to silence them. The High Court judge Mr Justice Sullivan, in his 2008 report Ensuring access to environmental justice in England and Wales, found that only the ‘very rich or the very poor’ could afford to fight environmental schemes – no news to environmental law specialists and campaigning groups such as Friends of the Earth.
Away from the as yet unspoilt rolling hills of the South Downs to the banks of the Mersey … the next stop on the audit trail was the North Liverpool Community Justice Centre situated in a housing estate in Vauxhall.
Do you remember those misty-eyed plans of New Labour to create ‘community justice’ courts in which judges engage directly with offenders, taking charge of their rehabilitation? The Liverpool project was based on the Red Hook Community Justice Center in New York and opened with some fanfare over four years ago. It cost £5.2 million to establish the pilot justice centre plus £1.8 million a year running costs.
On the day of my visit, Judge Fletcher explains how his court deals with the offending behaviour of his clientele, ranging from the 47-year-old chronic alcoholic ‘in his 32nd year of offending’, arrested for shoplifting £2 worth of ham, to the 15-year-old who has been before his court 30 times for anti-social behaviour offences. ‘The idea is based upon the judge being much more proactive and having a much greater say in a way that sentences are carried out as opposed to the judge just being the sentencer, just applying the law,’ he explains.
Crucial to the Community Justice Centre model was a single judge monitoring the progress of offenders, with onsite agencies so that offenders can be referred immediately to professionals who can deal with their addictions and housing problems – as well as involving the local community, seeking its views on particular problems and on appropriate punishment. The court has been a test bed for new approaches such as the Criminal Justice Act 2003 s178 which has given Judge Fletcher power to review community orders.
Judge Fletcher has been outspoken in support of what he calls ‘therapeutic jurisprudence’, talking about the value of the judge as ‘social worker’. ‘It is about trying to satisfy the public demand for a just result but at the same time doing that in a way which is actually responding to what the public really wants,’ he says. ‘That is not for the offender to be locked up for the rest of his life but it is that the man stops offending.’
Unfortunately, plans for future justice centres appear to have been quietly dropped. Apparently, they are a luxury we cannot afford. Tucked away in the recent green paper Engaging communities in criminal justice, ministers have ruled out future centres ‘in light of the costs involved’. The paper talks of other models, based on existing magistrates' courts, involving multi-agency working and ‘virtual problem-solving teams’. Whether ‘community justice’ will mean anything more than disaffected youths being forced to clear up blighted parks in high visibility with ‘community payback’ stamped on their backs, remains to be seen.
According to John Hodgson, who leads a protest group known collectively as PROUD (or Peacehaven Residents Opposed to Urban Development), the site is going to be ‘the size of 17 football pitches’. ‘It is an industrial process and we don’t want it,’ he says. The plan is for the treatment plant to be sited in his town and on the edge of the South Downs, recently designated a national park. Southern Water expects it to handle 95 million litres of waste generated by 250,000 people every day, most of whom live in Brighton. The plan also includes a proposal for an 11km tunnel, eight feet in diameter, running from Brighton to the new site and passing directly under Peacehaven homes. ‘There is a burning resentment that the city of Brighton and Hove is literally tipping its rubbish over its neighbour’s wall,’ says Hodgson.
You can see a video-film about their fight – inelegantly dubbed ‘the battle of Poohaven’ by the Brighton Argus – as part of the Guardian’s 'Justice gap' series which is based on LAG's Access to Justice Audit (see:www.guardian.co.uk/money/series/the-justice-gap). Unfortunately (at least as far as those residents of Peacehaven are concerned), their attempt to challenge the development after a five-year campaign failed shortly after the film was shot. The High Court last month refused to grant them permission to judicially review East Sussex County Council’s decision to allow Southern Water to develop the site. The residents’ legal fight was backed by legal aid (although they had to pay a £5,000 contribution) but it was the threat of legal costs that prevented them challenging that refusal. ‘Our lawyers advised us there was no more legal aid available - so if we’d lost we would face the costs,’ Hodgson said later. ‘And they could have been as much as £50,000. We couldn’t afford that.’
Whether you characterise the actions of Peacehaven residents as NIMBYism (as some Guardian bloggers have) or not, the role of public funding in allowing locals to challenge the seemingly unstoppable combined might of ministers and developers urgently needs to be examined. It is not an area of our cash-strapped legal aid system that has been looked at despite a widespread concern about the lack of local accountability in the planning system. If the planning system fails communities, they are led to believe that there are always the courts. It is not as simple as that.
Even if campaigners are supported by legal aid – and that is a big ‘if’ - legal costs are routinely deployed to silence them. The High Court judge Mr Justice Sullivan, in his 2008 report Ensuring access to environmental justice in England and Wales, found that only the ‘very rich or the very poor’ could afford to fight environmental schemes – no news to environmental law specialists and campaigning groups such as Friends of the Earth.
Away from the as yet unspoilt rolling hills of the South Downs to the banks of the Mersey … the next stop on the audit trail was the North Liverpool Community Justice Centre situated in a housing estate in Vauxhall.
Do you remember those misty-eyed plans of New Labour to create ‘community justice’ courts in which judges engage directly with offenders, taking charge of their rehabilitation? The Liverpool project was based on the Red Hook Community Justice Center in New York and opened with some fanfare over four years ago. It cost £5.2 million to establish the pilot justice centre plus £1.8 million a year running costs.
On the day of my visit, Judge Fletcher explains how his court deals with the offending behaviour of his clientele, ranging from the 47-year-old chronic alcoholic ‘in his 32nd year of offending’, arrested for shoplifting £2 worth of ham, to the 15-year-old who has been before his court 30 times for anti-social behaviour offences. ‘The idea is based upon the judge being much more proactive and having a much greater say in a way that sentences are carried out as opposed to the judge just being the sentencer, just applying the law,’ he explains.
Crucial to the Community Justice Centre model was a single judge monitoring the progress of offenders, with onsite agencies so that offenders can be referred immediately to professionals who can deal with their addictions and housing problems – as well as involving the local community, seeking its views on particular problems and on appropriate punishment. The court has been a test bed for new approaches such as the Criminal Justice Act 2003 s178 which has given Judge Fletcher power to review community orders.
Judge Fletcher has been outspoken in support of what he calls ‘therapeutic jurisprudence’, talking about the value of the judge as ‘social worker’. ‘It is about trying to satisfy the public demand for a just result but at the same time doing that in a way which is actually responding to what the public really wants,’ he says. ‘That is not for the offender to be locked up for the rest of his life but it is that the man stops offending.’
Unfortunately, plans for future justice centres appear to have been quietly dropped. Apparently, they are a luxury we cannot afford. Tucked away in the recent green paper Engaging communities in criminal justice, ministers have ruled out future centres ‘in light of the costs involved’. The paper talks of other models, based on existing magistrates' courts, involving multi-agency working and ‘virtual problem-solving teams’. Whether ‘community justice’ will mean anything more than disaffected youths being forced to clear up blighted parks in high visibility with ‘community payback’ stamped on their backs, remains to be seen.
Thursday, 21 May 2009
Criminal commotion
Criminal legal aid solicitors met in London last week to discuss the impending introduction of best value tendering (BVT) by the Legal Services Commission (LSC). In her opening speech, Joy Merriam, chair of the Criminal Law Solicitors Association, painted a grim picture warning that up to 80 per cent of firms might face closure.
Merriam talked about her own experience of closing her firm saying, 'It felt like a divorce'. With redundancy payments, run off insurance and other costs, she said the bill for winding up her practice came to £100,000. She feared that due to tighter LSC rules on payments many firms would be without cash to close properly. She pledged they would, 'Fight the introduction of best value tendering and we have the heart and belly to take on that fight'.
Legal aid minister Lord Bach addressed the conference after Merriam. Bach’s speech started with some pleasantries linked to the 60th anniversary of legal aid, but he moved on to say that, 'No other field of government expenditure has grown as much as legal aid. We have to face the fact total expenditure is not going up. Don’t believe any promises from the opposition'. This drew the first of many heckles from the hostile audience, 'We don’t believe them and we don’t believe you'. Bach argued that they had to identify the priorities for expenditure on legal aid and said, '… in a recession I want to protect social welfare law expenditure'.
The conference also heard speeches from LSC chair, Sir Bill Callaghan, defending BVT and Des Hudson, chief executive of the Law Society, who was critical of the proposals. Hudson believed the government and LSC had reneged on a promise made by the former chair of the LSC, Sir Michael Bichard, to evaluate the BVT pilots fully prior to any general roll out. In a question and answer session Callaghan answered this point. Citing the recession he said, 'Times have changed since Sir Michael made his comments'.
While a few months ago the public position among all practitioners was hostile to BVT, off the record some would say they were relaxed about the proposals believing their firm would win. Since the publication of the document setting out the LSC’s proposals for implementing the scheme the view of practitioners in public and private has shifted decisively against BVT. Many cannot get to grips with the complex bidding process proposed. There is also bitter resentment that the Bar got a deal on very high cost cases by using a boycott, while in contrast many solicitors now face a Hobson’s choice of risking a 'suicide bid' to keep police station and magistrates' court work or pull out at a time when the recession is making it difficult to switch into other areas of law.
LAG fears a chaotic scramble to make bids followed by recriminations and litigation, which will impact on services leading to miscarriages of justice. A pause to properly evaluate the pilot schemes before rushing to implement BVT across the country would seem to be the only sensible option.
Merriam talked about her own experience of closing her firm saying, 'It felt like a divorce'. With redundancy payments, run off insurance and other costs, she said the bill for winding up her practice came to £100,000. She feared that due to tighter LSC rules on payments many firms would be without cash to close properly. She pledged they would, 'Fight the introduction of best value tendering and we have the heart and belly to take on that fight'.
Legal aid minister Lord Bach addressed the conference after Merriam. Bach’s speech started with some pleasantries linked to the 60th anniversary of legal aid, but he moved on to say that, 'No other field of government expenditure has grown as much as legal aid. We have to face the fact total expenditure is not going up. Don’t believe any promises from the opposition'. This drew the first of many heckles from the hostile audience, 'We don’t believe them and we don’t believe you'. Bach argued that they had to identify the priorities for expenditure on legal aid and said, '… in a recession I want to protect social welfare law expenditure'.
The conference also heard speeches from LSC chair, Sir Bill Callaghan, defending BVT and Des Hudson, chief executive of the Law Society, who was critical of the proposals. Hudson believed the government and LSC had reneged on a promise made by the former chair of the LSC, Sir Michael Bichard, to evaluate the BVT pilots fully prior to any general roll out. In a question and answer session Callaghan answered this point. Citing the recession he said, 'Times have changed since Sir Michael made his comments'.
While a few months ago the public position among all practitioners was hostile to BVT, off the record some would say they were relaxed about the proposals believing their firm would win. Since the publication of the document setting out the LSC’s proposals for implementing the scheme the view of practitioners in public and private has shifted decisively against BVT. Many cannot get to grips with the complex bidding process proposed. There is also bitter resentment that the Bar got a deal on very high cost cases by using a boycott, while in contrast many solicitors now face a Hobson’s choice of risking a 'suicide bid' to keep police station and magistrates' court work or pull out at a time when the recession is making it difficult to switch into other areas of law.
LAG fears a chaotic scramble to make bids followed by recriminations and litigation, which will impact on services leading to miscarriages of justice. A pause to properly evaluate the pilot schemes before rushing to implement BVT across the country would seem to be the only sensible option.
Thursday, 14 May 2009
Tesco Law for social welfare law?
The Legal Services Board is keen to press ahead with plans to licence the first alternative business structures (ABSs) by 2011. ABSs will allow lawyers and other professionals to work together (in perfect harmony no doubt) in providing legal and other services. The legal profession gets worried about the prospect of the 'Tesco Law' scenario, big firms using their branding and marketing clout to monopolise personal injury and other work. The Co-op has already dipped its toe in the legal services market as it provides will writing and other services to its membership.
The reality of modern life is that people are more likely to be made aware of the need to write a will, for example, by picking up information at their supermarket or increasingly their supermarket website, than they are by calling into their high street solicitor's office. Provided conflicts of interest are regulated against and the quality and independence of advice is not compromised, access to legal services should be improved by the ABS model. Also, the experience of opening the conveyancing market showed that increased competition in legal services does drive down prices, which is always one of the main barriers to access to justice.
What LAG fears though is that ABSs will just become another way of delivering legal services in the profitable areas of law which lend themselves well to a commoditised bulk processing - conveyencing (at least pre-credit crunch) and personal injury being the obvious examples. Poor people, who need legal advice on benefits, housing and other social welfare matters, are not so profitable and providing services to them might not sit so easily with a company’s image. LAG also has a sneaking fear that such businesses might not be so keen on promoting employment and other rights if this would compromise their core business.
Nevertheless ABSs do present an opportunity. It would help access to justice immensely if supermarkets and other businesses with high public recognition could act as a conduit for accessing legal advice for people facing housing, debt and other common legal problems. Perhaps it is time for some creative thinking - in the future could we see a large legal aid firm or Citizens Advice Bureau forming an ABS with Asda to provide social welfare law services paid for by legal aid?
The reality of modern life is that people are more likely to be made aware of the need to write a will, for example, by picking up information at their supermarket or increasingly their supermarket website, than they are by calling into their high street solicitor's office. Provided conflicts of interest are regulated against and the quality and independence of advice is not compromised, access to legal services should be improved by the ABS model. Also, the experience of opening the conveyancing market showed that increased competition in legal services does drive down prices, which is always one of the main barriers to access to justice.
What LAG fears though is that ABSs will just become another way of delivering legal services in the profitable areas of law which lend themselves well to a commoditised bulk processing - conveyencing (at least pre-credit crunch) and personal injury being the obvious examples. Poor people, who need legal advice on benefits, housing and other social welfare matters, are not so profitable and providing services to them might not sit so easily with a company’s image. LAG also has a sneaking fear that such businesses might not be so keen on promoting employment and other rights if this would compromise their core business.
Nevertheless ABSs do present an opportunity. It would help access to justice immensely if supermarkets and other businesses with high public recognition could act as a conduit for accessing legal advice for people facing housing, debt and other common legal problems. Perhaps it is time for some creative thinking - in the future could we see a large legal aid firm or Citizens Advice Bureau forming an ABS with Asda to provide social welfare law services paid for by legal aid?
Monday, 27 April 2009
Reports from the audit trail … Number 2
Until January, Tracy and her husband Melvyn lived with their five kids at their family home near Derby. The home was repossessed that month on two weeks’ notice and the family offered emergency housing by the council to avoid them becoming homeless. Instead, friends stepped in. ‘At that time I was a wreck. I couldn’t cope with crowds and I didn’t want to go out. My safe haven had been taken away,’ Tracy recalls.
Tracy and Melvyn, together with their three youngest, stayed at a neighbours’ house. ‘We slept on the floor and the three boys shared a double bed with his son,’ she says. Her two eldest kids were accommodated elsewhere, one with Tracy’s sister and the other with a close friend.
I met Tracy at Derbyshire Housing Aid in March where adviser, Gavin Isham, had been sorting her family’s debt and housing problems over the last few months. ‘We came down here to get some advice and soon realised that we were going to lose the house,’ Tracy relates. ‘There was no way out of it. We’d struggled for two years on our own.’ The family’s financial problems began when her husband lost his job a couple of years ago. They were eventually forced out of their home after a lender who provided a consolidation loan of £30,000 pursued possession proceedings. Up until that point they hadn’t defaulted on their mortgage.
When Tracy comes into Derbyshire Housing Aid she has good news. The family has been given a four-bedroom council house. ‘Getting rehoused was a complete nightmare. If it hadn’t been for Gavin I don’t know what we would have done,’ she says. ‘You have to bid for your home – meanwhile my family were living all over the place.’ The lawyer also represented them in court.
Derbyshire Housing Aid is part of the Derby CLAC, or Community Legal Advice Centre. The new service, which won the tender in a straight competition with the Sheffield-based company A4e, has 38 paid staff and comprises Derby Citizens Advice and Law Centre, Derbyshire Housing Aid as well as two solicitors’ firms, the Smith Partnership and Moody & Woolley. Some 7,522 people have come to the CLAC in its first nine months and 82 per cent come from ‘priority groups’ – in other words, the unemployed, low income, black and minority ethnic groups, victims of violence etc ….
Derby CLAC is feeling the full impact of the so-called credit crunch. Under its contract with the Legal Services Commission, it is required to see clients needing specialist advice within two weeks. However, such is demand, the queue for debt work has stretched to four weeks. At Derbyshire Housing Aid, which runs the duty scheme at the local county court, four out of ten clients face possession orders. It reckons that in a three-month period ending in January, some 390 people were at risking of losing their homes. It is a 78 per cent increase on the previous year.
Chris Pass, Derby CLAC’s manager, reckons that this new-style CLAC has been well received. ‘People seem to like the fact that everything is in one place,’ he says. ‘We get a lot of people with multiple problems. If you have employment problems and you have been made redundant, then you are going to potentially have debt problems, housing problems etc. Hopefully by capturing things a bit earlier we can actually alleviate problems more quickly.’
It’s a sentiment echoed by Jude Simmons, head of community work at Community Links when I visit a couple of weeks later. Community Links is an innovative charity in Newham, East London, and in many ways is a proto-CLAC offering a wide range of advice services (although it doesn’t have employment or family contracts). ‘People don’t come to us and say that they have a letter from their creditors saying they owe them £8,000 - can we sort it out?,’ reckons Jude Simmons. ‘Often we cannot understand what they are talking about when they first come in. They don’t speak English, have mental health problems and nearly always lead really chaotic lives.’ Nearly always? ‘Yes, nearly always,’ she says.
In 2008 some 17,000 came to Community Links for help. As Simmons puts it, there is ‘a huge churn of people’ in an area where some 106 different languages are spoken. Newham is the ‘first port of call’ for many, Simmons says. ‘As soon as people make anything of themselves they move out further down the railway track to Barking and Dagenham and further away.’
How are these two very different services coping with fixed fees? Chris Pass reports that the jury is out. For example, he explains that in welfare rights, where the fixed fee is about £220 per case, the average case runs at about £180. But there are ongoing cases which are ‘basically running to about £400 … not that many but they pull the average to £220 or higher’.
In other words, there’s not much, if any, margin for comfort. Unsurprisingly, for Community Links, with its demanding clientele, the introduction of fixed fees creates a difficult business model. It is hard to make them work, explains Simmons, because ‘if we used to get paid £58 an hour and now we’re getting paid £200 a case, cases should be running at about three and a half hours. Often we haven’t really unravelled what clients want at that stage because they don’t even know what their problem is.’
But as Simmons says: ‘We have to make this work though because there are 40 people queuing outside every day. If we do not help them nobody else can.’ By the time I arrived at Community Links at 8.30am last month a long line of prospective clients was already there. Community Links reckons that eight out of ten people that wait outside are eligible for legal aid. However half won’t have the correct paper work and so have to queue again.
Last autumn students conducted a research project interviewing those waiting. The results were surprising. Apparently, people didn’t complain about the length of the wait, or having to suffer the cold outside or even the lack of privacy in giving personal details at a crowded reception. ‘They wanted magazines, toys for the children, and space for the buggies,’ reports Simmons. ‘People are in such need that they are prepared to wait all day.’
Tracy and Melvyn, together with their three youngest, stayed at a neighbours’ house. ‘We slept on the floor and the three boys shared a double bed with his son,’ she says. Her two eldest kids were accommodated elsewhere, one with Tracy’s sister and the other with a close friend.
I met Tracy at Derbyshire Housing Aid in March where adviser, Gavin Isham, had been sorting her family’s debt and housing problems over the last few months. ‘We came down here to get some advice and soon realised that we were going to lose the house,’ Tracy relates. ‘There was no way out of it. We’d struggled for two years on our own.’ The family’s financial problems began when her husband lost his job a couple of years ago. They were eventually forced out of their home after a lender who provided a consolidation loan of £30,000 pursued possession proceedings. Up until that point they hadn’t defaulted on their mortgage.
When Tracy comes into Derbyshire Housing Aid she has good news. The family has been given a four-bedroom council house. ‘Getting rehoused was a complete nightmare. If it hadn’t been for Gavin I don’t know what we would have done,’ she says. ‘You have to bid for your home – meanwhile my family were living all over the place.’ The lawyer also represented them in court.
Derbyshire Housing Aid is part of the Derby CLAC, or Community Legal Advice Centre. The new service, which won the tender in a straight competition with the Sheffield-based company A4e, has 38 paid staff and comprises Derby Citizens Advice and Law Centre, Derbyshire Housing Aid as well as two solicitors’ firms, the Smith Partnership and Moody & Woolley. Some 7,522 people have come to the CLAC in its first nine months and 82 per cent come from ‘priority groups’ – in other words, the unemployed, low income, black and minority ethnic groups, victims of violence etc ….
Derby CLAC is feeling the full impact of the so-called credit crunch. Under its contract with the Legal Services Commission, it is required to see clients needing specialist advice within two weeks. However, such is demand, the queue for debt work has stretched to four weeks. At Derbyshire Housing Aid, which runs the duty scheme at the local county court, four out of ten clients face possession orders. It reckons that in a three-month period ending in January, some 390 people were at risking of losing their homes. It is a 78 per cent increase on the previous year.
Chris Pass, Derby CLAC’s manager, reckons that this new-style CLAC has been well received. ‘People seem to like the fact that everything is in one place,’ he says. ‘We get a lot of people with multiple problems. If you have employment problems and you have been made redundant, then you are going to potentially have debt problems, housing problems etc. Hopefully by capturing things a bit earlier we can actually alleviate problems more quickly.’
It’s a sentiment echoed by Jude Simmons, head of community work at Community Links when I visit a couple of weeks later. Community Links is an innovative charity in Newham, East London, and in many ways is a proto-CLAC offering a wide range of advice services (although it doesn’t have employment or family contracts). ‘People don’t come to us and say that they have a letter from their creditors saying they owe them £8,000 - can we sort it out?,’ reckons Jude Simmons. ‘Often we cannot understand what they are talking about when they first come in. They don’t speak English, have mental health problems and nearly always lead really chaotic lives.’ Nearly always? ‘Yes, nearly always,’ she says.
In 2008 some 17,000 came to Community Links for help. As Simmons puts it, there is ‘a huge churn of people’ in an area where some 106 different languages are spoken. Newham is the ‘first port of call’ for many, Simmons says. ‘As soon as people make anything of themselves they move out further down the railway track to Barking and Dagenham and further away.’
How are these two very different services coping with fixed fees? Chris Pass reports that the jury is out. For example, he explains that in welfare rights, where the fixed fee is about £220 per case, the average case runs at about £180. But there are ongoing cases which are ‘basically running to about £400 … not that many but they pull the average to £220 or higher’.
In other words, there’s not much, if any, margin for comfort. Unsurprisingly, for Community Links, with its demanding clientele, the introduction of fixed fees creates a difficult business model. It is hard to make them work, explains Simmons, because ‘if we used to get paid £58 an hour and now we’re getting paid £200 a case, cases should be running at about three and a half hours. Often we haven’t really unravelled what clients want at that stage because they don’t even know what their problem is.’
But as Simmons says: ‘We have to make this work though because there are 40 people queuing outside every day. If we do not help them nobody else can.’ By the time I arrived at Community Links at 8.30am last month a long line of prospective clients was already there. Community Links reckons that eight out of ten people that wait outside are eligible for legal aid. However half won’t have the correct paper work and so have to queue again.
Last autumn students conducted a research project interviewing those waiting. The results were surprising. Apparently, people didn’t complain about the length of the wait, or having to suffer the cold outside or even the lack of privacy in giving personal details at a crowded reception. ‘They wanted magazines, toys for the children, and space for the buggies,’ reports Simmons. ‘People are in such need that they are prepared to wait all day.’
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