Nerve 16 - Be Advised! Legal Aid Slashed!

Be Advised! Legal Aid Slashed!

In 2009, the Legal Services Commission celebrated 60 years since the start of the legal aid system. Legal aid enables people on limited incomes to get access to legal advice that they would never otherwise be able to afford. But the organisations who provide the advice services saw little to celebrate. In the past 10 years the government has whittled away at legal aid funding, and organisations with legal aid contracts are expected to apply ever tighter means tests to their clients. The result is that fewer people qualify for legal aid.

This matters because the type of legal issues that are funded by legal aid contracts include housing, welfare rights, debt, immigration, child custody, employment, exactly the issues that affect working class people, who can't afford private legal fees and are most likely to have issues with the state, landlords or employers. An adequate legal aid service is essential if they are to get justice.

Last year, while it was celebrating the 60th year of legal aid, the Legal Services Commission also gave out new legal aid contracts which amounted to budget cuts for some of the established advice services. It did not involve direct cuts in funding, but a change in how much legal aid money gets paid for each case the service providers take on. The effect was the same as a budget cut and resulted in the immediate closure of four law centres around the country, including the Liverpool 8 Law Centre.

Advice services are provided by a range of voluntary organisations, law centres and solicitors firms In Liverpool, the voluntary organisations include the Citizens Advice Bureau, Liverpool Action for the Disabled (LAD), Local Solutions, Merseyside Welfare Rights and Kirkby Unemployed Centre. The solicitors firms include Jackson & Canter and Silversmiths. These organisations between them only employ a few dozen people, but the services they provide help thousands of people a year. They pull in tens of thousands of pounds into the local economy through extra benefits won for their clients and debts written off or reduced. They also reduce hardship by preventing evictions and making bad employers pay for unlawful sackings. They curb abuses by the local authority, which is also a landlord and an employer.

Voluntary organisations have only been able to apply for legal aid contracts since the late 90s and most still don't depend exclusively on legal aid. They also get local government funding, which tends to cover a large part of their running costs and management expenses. But this too can be subject to arbitrary cuts, as was seen a few years ago when Liverpool City Council cut the grant it gave to Merseyside Welfare Rights.

Some older advisers think legal aid funding has had a mixed effect on the voluntary sector. It provides more money to run the service and requires advisers to take a more professional approach to what they do. But it makes the job insecure because the organisation has to reapply for its legal aid contract every two years and it tends to make management more money-oriented and less interested in providing a community service. In addition, the voluntary sector is plagued with bad management and some voluntary organisations fail to get their legal aid contract renewed, or have it reduced. Solicitors firms tend to be more successful at running their legal aid contracts, but very few now want them. The cuts mean they cannot cover their running costs and many firms simply don't apply to renew their contracts.

The Legal Services Commission's latest policy is to only give contracts to big organisations under a single management. This has forced advice agencies to combine into consortia to be able to bid to keep their contracts. The logic behind it is that bigger organisations have lower management costs and will need less public funding. But there is no evidence that this is true and it has nothing to do with improving the quality of advice services.

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