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Law centres: down but not out – despite cuts and closures
Despite law centres suffering substantial cuts over the past few years, the Law Centres Network struck an upbeat note with its annual report, Picking Up the Pieces, which was launched at the organisation’s annual conference last month. According to the report, law centres have suffered a 60 per cent loss in legal aid revenue due to the cuts introduced by LASPO, and this has led to the closure of 11 centres and reductions in staff at those that remain. In his opening remarks at the conference, Roger Smith (pictured), a member of the LCN’s executive, contrasted the excitement of the 1970s, when the law centres movement was founded, with the need after the legal aid and other cuts to continue ‘fighting to keep the resources we have’.
LCN’s annual report outlines its role in providing law centres with advice on supporting innovation by, for example, producing guidance on charging for services, a step that would have been unthinkable even just a few years ago. Rochdale and Islington, LCN reports, are two law centres that have set up subsidiaries that charge in order to cross-subsidise their free services. LCN also supports local law centres in preparing funding applications to trusts and other funders to replace the cash lost from the legal aid scheme and local councils. LCN hits out at the government for ‘[r]epeated and uneven cuts to public spending’, which are disproportionately affecting disadvantaged people, and identifies the shrinking cash available for support services like law centres as one of the main challenges facing them.
The conference discussed the link between fighting poverty and access to justice in its opening plenary. Delegates heard from Hazel Thoms of the Scottish Legal Aid Board, Big Lottery Fund’s Dan Paskins, and Robert Joyce from influential think tank the Institute of Fiscal Studies.
Joyce outlined evidence that shows ‘the nature of poverty is changing’, with a big shift to ‘increasing poverty among working families’. In answer to a question from Legal Action, he said he believes the pending ‘cuts to tax credits will put a lot of pressure on low-income families’ and this will not be offset by any increase in the minimum wage.
Introducing Thoms, Smith contrasted the gradual approach to reform of legal aid in Scotland to that of England and Wales. In her speech, Thoms confirmed that instead of going down the contracting route, the Scottish legal aid system has remained primarily a ‘judicare system’, with most of the funding going to individual cases undertaken by law firms. She also stressed the importance of ‘adopting a collaborative approach’ in working with providers and the importance of trying to coordinate the funding and planning of services, giving the example of the board’s work with the National Lottery in Scotland.
Paskins referred to the difficulties around funding that law centres are experiencing in England and Wales, and outlined how the lottery has responded to this with its Help Through Crisis programme, ‘which will at least give them some stable funding for five years’.