The Public Legal Education and Support task force says making people aware of their legal rights can no longer be a marginal issue, reports Jon Robins


What does a web-based project designed to tackle the myth of common law marriage have in common with a south London-based initiative to fight council tenant evictions or, for that matter, a TV series on a community channel about the perils of debt for the Asian community in Leicester?



This somewhat disparate collection of activities was flagged up by Professor Dame Hazel Genn as prime examples of public legal education (PLE) this month, at the launch of a report by an influential task force she chairs.



The report states: ‘PLE provides people with awareness, knowledge and understanding of rights and legal issues, together with the confidence and skills they need to deal with disputes and gain access to justice. Equally important, it helps people recognise when they may need support, what sort of advice is available and how to go about getting it.’



Professor Genn says: ‘We need a clear identity and raised profile for PLE as a distinct activity and a recognisable brand.’ The three aforementioned initiatives sprung into existence without necessarily being conscious of their existence as ‘PLE’, so why does there need to be a brand or a strategy for the future development of PLE?



‘The biggest advantage is that you can learn from past experience about what works,’ Professor Genn says. ‘When I started, I had a task force of 22 people representing 22 different organisations and they didn’t know what each other had been doing. It was extraordinary. We had to do our own research to put together these examples.’



The Public Legal Education and Support (PLEAS) task force includes representatives from Citizens Advice, the Citizenship Foundation, Disability Rights Commission, Bar Council, Office of Fair Trading and Legal Services Commission. The problem for PLE is that it is ‘very fragmented and disparate’, agrees Martin Jones, project director at the Advice Services Alliance and a PLEAS task force member. ‘In the independent sector and for law centres where it has become part of the tradition, PLE still struggles to survive. It has always been a marginal issue for the organisations that are doing it. They usually have the interest for a period and the funding comes and goes. I don’t think at the moment that it is a movement. I’d very much like it to develop.’



The PLEAS report calls for, as ‘an optimal solution’, the creation of a new statutory body to lead that movement. ‘This will take time and in the interim the task force recommends the immediate establishment of a not-for-profit company to take PLE forward in the first year or perhaps two years.’



It calls for funding ‘in the region of £1.5 million’ in its first year. The Ministry of Justice (MoJ) has responded enthusiastically to the report, with minister Lord Hunt saying: ‘I will now discuss with colleagues in government how best we can overcome the obstacles to effective public legal education.’



One of the main concerns that PLE seeks to tackle is what Professor Genn calls ‘unnecessary helplessness’ on the part of the public, often the most vulnerable members. MoJ economists reckon that the cost over three to four years could be as much as £13 billion. As Professor Genn has documented in her own legal research, the burden of unresolved legal problems fall more on the socially excluded ‘who are less likely than the average citizen to take any action or seek help with their problems’. Such problems tend to ‘cluster and cascade’.



‘Small problems become larger problems, which become larger still,’ Professor Genn adds. She says the ‘extraordinary lack of understanding is a major reason why about one million civil justice problems go unresolved every year. This is legal exclusion on a massive scale’.



As a result, many PLE projects have been involved in arming the young with information about their legal rights. One such initiative is the work done by Stockton-on-Tees Citizens’ Advice Bureau with Blakeston Community College. ‘We found a lot of young people weren’t even coming in for advice,’ comments Mike Robinson, the bureau’s manager. He says an opportunity arose to get involved when the school approached the bureau as part of its involvement in the government’s extended schools programme.



Mel Dickerson, one of the bureau’s debt care workers, has been teaching key stage 3 and 4 pupils in a weekly tutor group at the school about ‘employment, legal, social welfare and housing rights – all the kinds of things that will make a difference to them when they leave school’. What kind of response has she had? ‘Generally, when someone walks into a classroom, the kids just yawn, but I was really pleased. They tended to be fairly interested.’ She is persuaded by the case for PLE insofar as it means educating prospective clients about their legal entitlements. ‘Frankly, it’s shocking that people don’t know what they are entitled to,’ she says.



Mr Robinson says: ‘There’s a lot of evidence to suggest that young people are much less likely to enforce their rights and much less likely to get to advice services. So we want to get in there early.’ Youth Access, a national membership group for young people’s services, recently found that under-25s account for nearly one-third of all housing and homelessness problems, but less than 10% of clients.



Legal education is an issue close to the heart of the Citizenship Foundation. The group was set up in 1984 by solicitor Andrew Phillips, now Lord Phillips of Sudbury, who persuaded the Law Society to fund the ‘Law in Education’ project to develop teaching materials to introduce students to their legal rights and responsibilities. Recently, the Law Society Charity awarded the Citizenship Foundation a grant of £87,500 to further its work in promoting a better understanding of the law. The foundation’s work includes mock trials and a ‘lawyers in schools’ programme, which puts lawyers and trainees into classrooms in six town and cities in a bid to improve awareness of the law.



‘We’d contend that there needs to be a very strong strand of law-related education at the heart of the citizenship curriculum in schools,’ says chief executive Tony Breslin. Mr Robinson agrees, but adds that the legal content in that part of the curriculum is ‘a bit wimpy’. However, Mr Breslin points out that the citizenship element of the National Curriculum is less than five years old. ‘All of the studies say that it’s getting stronger, but teachers are most cautious about matters of law and politics and, of course, in our definition of citizenship, legal and political literacy are at its heart.’ He adds that the foundation’s interest in PLE is broader than young people and includes adults who have not benefited from any legal education.



One of the most successful examples of PLE has been the government-funded Living Together campaign, a project run by the Advice Services Alliance (ASA) aimed at eradicating the myth of common law marriage. Its success has been secured through a user-friendly web site plus a media campaign which even inspired a story line in ‘Emmerdale’.



‘It’s preventative and about getting people to take action early, which is one of the key themes of PLE,’ says Martin Jones, project director on the ASA’s Advicenow project, which runs the campaign. ‘Most people get their information from the mass media. So if you want to get a legal message across, it’s a good way to do it.’



Of course, it is difficult, if not impossible, to measure the success of such initiatives. Mr Robinson says: ‘So much advice funding is tied to advice outcomes and we aren’t going to see any outcomes for another three to four years – even then we aren’t going to follow everyone from Blakeston to find out what has happened.’ He argues that a national body to promote PLE would be a step forward. ‘But what needs to change is the acceptance of how advice is presented. At the moment, too many organisations offer such a static service.’ Others argue that a national body would let everyone else off the hook.



Unsurprisingly, the Legal Services Commission supports many of the ideas behind PLE – Professor Genn’s research on the benefit of early preventative action and the cascading effect of problem clusters has informed its vision of community legal advice centres and networks. As Crispin Passmore, director of the Community Law Service, puts it: ‘It’s better to have a fence at the top of a cliff than an ambulance at the bottom. Lawyers are ambulances by another name, no disrespect meant.’ He argues that lawyers are ‘a conservative profession’ and could learn a lot about the kind of initiatives featured in the PLEAS report. The telephone helpline CLS Direct and the CLS website fit the PLE model.



In the fight over scarce resources, is there not a danger that PLE could undermine traditionally legal aided services? ‘That would be a completely misplaced concern,’ insists Nony Ardill, legal policy officer at Age Concern. ‘PLE is no substitute for legal advice. What it does is effectively give people the skills and confidence to recognise when they have a legal problem and to react appropriately.’



Would the commission divert money from face-to-face advice for PLE projects? ‘We’re under enormous financial pressures, as everyone knows,’ says Mr Passmore. ‘The reality is that the vast amount of legal aid is always going to be spent on the ambulance, to some extent rightly so. But we have to find a way of doing legal education, and doing it in as efficient and as good a way as possible.’



Jon Robins is a freelance journalist