Legal advice agencies hit by funding cut

I could not agree more with the previous comment. I am already seeing disasters on the legal front for so many new LIPs - one wonders what the eventual toll will be in April?

Perhaps one must set about creating a new definition of the word 'Justice'?

is there something nasty going on in the Justice woodshed?

Over a year ago my MP responded to my concern about LIPs and legal aid cuts that all was well as the Judges would look after them.Yet only earlier this month Lord Justice Thomas's brochure for SRLs (new style LIPs) in the Interim Applications Court commended the RCJ CAB, referred to their booklets and said SRLs should " if possible take advice from the CAB". Well it doesn't look as though it will be possible much longer as its not part of the LSCs core business.So whose core business is it? Oh yes...it's the judiciary's of course!

And cutting the ASA and Law Centres funding suggests that an even more legally illiterate public is part of the plan by ensuring informed self help is significantly reduced.

Good luck to their lordships.

Solicitor ( retired)

Even by the standards of recent proposals for reform this is daft. It seems like a pincer movement...this on one side, non-lawyer Grayling bleating on about QCs on the other.

Gloomy times for justice.

Councillors are getting more casework as ATOS drives disabled people from DLA onto Employment Support Allowance then onto JSA even if they're completely immobile. Nearly all disabled claimants are refused ESA and either appeal or try to 'find work' on the much lower JSA - or increasingly, contemplate suicide. The appeals take 6+ months and they get £70pw basic ESA instead of £120pw DLA and fall behind with bills and rent. The only people grinning about this unfolding nightmare are ultra-right-wing Conservatives and the loan sharks. Wonga loans are at 4,200% APR for example. I am dreading my surgeries by October once all the 'reforms' bed in and Universal Credit includes Housing benefit gets paid a month in arrears to people who barely budget weekly. It doesn't take a rocket-scientist to predict that a tsunami of rent arrears will hit the UK.

Now when you factor in the ten major welfare 'reforms' in April thru October and the removal of all specialist advice funding by the UK Government when £1M of legal aid and Legal Services Commission funding ends in Cardiff in April - we have a recipe for mass homelessness and civic disorder that could cost the city tens of millions when we have to cut £25M this year and £25M next year from our budgets. It's difficult to forecast the full impact but from the end of summer onwards, I fear we may be forced into drastic measures such as leasing hundreds of hotel rooms as the hostel spaces quickly run out.

I Chair Riverside Advice with the largest LSC contract in Wales and so, apart from some Housing contract work, I will have to lay off 20 out of 28 staff in April and disband a centre of experise built up over the years. Our two sister groups, Speakeasy and Cardiff Law Centre may well close leaving no expert, accredited, Quality Marked and indemnified services in the capital.

Regretably, CAB in Cardiff and other groups offer 15 minute sessions for a few hours a week at a series of 'hubs' or via call centres but, as many of you know, 80% of specialist advice business is by referral from doctors, social workers, housing officers and health care professionals - such detailed and often time-consuming support is, I believe, beyond the scope of such generalist 'Advice Lite' services that will remain who will be unable to support clients through the various appeal and tribunal treadmills bar the odd letter or two.

There's more to specialist advice than throughput and ticking boxes but many council officers and politicians can not or will not grasp the fundamental differences beween generalist and specialist advice and often portray specialist advice to potential funders as 'not being value for money.' Bias and ignorance are the most toxic of bedfellows.

'We're all in it together' is a shallow slogan that highlights the true nature of a similar empty phrase - 'trickle-down economics' - only from April 2013 onwards the only 'trickle-down' will be from Hooray Henries urinating on the homeless sick and disabled people sleeping in shop doorways.

Cllr Paul Mitchell
Chair Riverside Advice

No wonder the LIP handbook was prepared!!

I have had many years' experience as a solicitor in private practice, dealing with clients who need help and support for many reasons, not just financial. I have also voluntarily worked as a Trustee for fifteen years for the local CAB and also for a major mental health charity. I have been involved in other areas supporting those who need help - campaigning for better mental health community support, for example. This is not party political, it is my way of giving back to society.

I just cannot comprehend the sheer viciousness of the combination of these cuts. Remove benefits from the disabled, remove funding for basic access to advice, by definition remove access to debt counselling normally provided by advice agencies now being disbanded - to what sort of third world level are we sinking? Has the Justice Minister the remotest idea of the juggling which is a necessary part of the life of those on the margins?

I know there need to be economies and I know that there are crooked claimants and debtors who will happily walk away from their debts; but the vast majority find themselves where they are through no fault of their own, and I challenge the minister to manage for more than a month on a single person's benefit without requiring the help and advice he is denying to others.

The government seems determined to go the Mitt Romney way. Clearly it is not concerned how people see how it despises those who are not among its favoured elites and cliques. This is the socialised bullying of the playground transferred into serious questions of power and wealth.

Declaring hand on heart, how they care, they understand, how they or their grandparents came from hard times and places, does not make that declaration any less of a lie. For a lie it is seen to be.

Injustice is not only being done, but being seen to be done.