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The Birmingham legal aid blues
With a population of just over one million, Birmingham is undisputedly the second largest city in the UK. Birmingham Citizens Advice Bureau service is one of the largest in the country. However, after the city council cut its grant in 2010/11 from £590,000 a year to the present level of £265,000, the service had to reduce its number of outlets in the city from five to four and cut its opening hours. According to Emma Cook, acting chief executive for the Birmingham bureau, the grant reduction led to 7,500 fewer people being assisted over the last year, with numbers down to under 30,000.
‘The loss of our legal aid contracts from April means a third of our service has gone’, said Emma Cook. Over £700,000 worth of legal help work in debt and welfare benefits was cut with effect from April, and the bureau has had to redeploy or make redundant the 27 staff who worked on the legal aid contracts.
A few hundred yards from the main city centre bureau on Commercial Street are the offices of solicitors’ firm, Community Law Partnership (CLP). The firm employs 30 staff, including three partners. After the legal aid cuts in April, CLP had to make redundant two fee earners, who undertook mainly legal aid work in benefits and debt. Rosaleen Kilbane, partner at CLP, explained that, despite the firm losing money on legal help work, ‘we did it as it was necessary to provide a good service to the clients. We now have to turn away clients and ration the matter starts we do have for priority cases such as street homeless families’.
Chris Johnson, also a partner at the firm, criticised the loss of welfare benefits from the scope of legal aid. While legal aid is still available for clients facing the loss of their home, he argued that rent arrears are often caused by problems with benefits. Recently, the firm tried to get exceptional funding to advise a client on housing benefit facing eviction, but was refused. Chris Johnson said: ‘What we were doing (before the cuts in April) was working. Now it is not working.’