 Time may be running out for the pioneering law centres movement, born 40 years ago at the high point of 1960s idealism. Jon Robins reports on the sector's struggle for survival |
If there is one section of the legal community above all others that has been left reeling as a result of the introduction of the Carter reforms, it is the law centres movement. Less than six months into the new regime of fixed fees, the strain on a sector that has always been prone to funding crises began to show dramatically.
The Legal Action Group reported last month that eight law centres in London were fearful for their short-term futures. Southwest London Law Centres were the first to anno
unce that they were ‘on the brink of closure’ and Islington, Lambeth, North Kensington and Tower Hamlets all expressed similar concerns. A survey by the Law Centres Federation found a similarly depressing picture nationwide, with almost one in five of the 54 law centres facing the threat of closure and almost half (49%) in serious debt. That was reported in the Gazette in the same week as liquidators went in to Gateshead Law Centre (see [2008] Gazette, 13 March, 1).
There is, of course, a bleak irony that this should be happening as the government’s programme for CLACs and CLANs (community legal advice centres and networks) has been put temporarily on ice as part of the Law Society/Legal Services Commission (LSC)/Ministry of Justice concessions. All that is sensible – and despite the controversial and rather random roll-out of CLACs and CLANs there is much to be commended – is embodied in the law centre idea. The LSC describes the purpose of a community legal advice centre thus: ‘To deliver legal advice services to local communities according to local needs and priorities.’ As Roger Smith, director of Justice and a former law centre manager, has noted, a CLAC is nothing but ‘a souped-up law centre’.
So, with the government’s vision for community law parked in a siding until 2010, it is timely to consider the unique contribution of the law centre. ‘We’ve been the last hope of tens of thousands of people for more than 30 years. We have stayed open through cuts, reforms and all manner of assaults on civil liberties, even when staff had to work for nothing and public donations were the only thing keeping us going,’ says Michael Ashe, chief executive of South West London Law Centres.
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‘Nothing less than the introduction of a new public service to operate alongside, and supplement, the private profession would suffice to deal adequately with the problem of providing proper legal services to a section of the public who went short of them,’ wrote Michael Zander QC, emeritus professor of law at the LSE, about law centres in 1978.
‘There was a feeling at the time, and it still exists to a certain extent now, that this was to be a different type of legal service offered to the public in neighbourhoods, done very casually, open in the evenings with outreach work and educational work,’ Zander says now. ‘The idea was to lead the way with test cases and promote legal services for whole groups of people, for example a tenants’ group.’ The work of the centre was ‘to be more flexible, informal, more activist, proactive and a more enterprising way of providing legal services’, he adds.
This was ‘a radical attempt to change the delivery of legal services’, says Roger Smith, director of Justice. He joined Camden in 1973 before becoming director of West Hampstead in 1975. ‘The idea was that law centres were going to be about systematic change and not just “sticking plaster” legal services,’ he says. ‘These were organisations that, through their work in the community and their work in the courts, wanted to change the world. It was highly idealistic.’ A generation of committed young lawyers began their careers in law centres, including a number who went on to become ministers in the present government, including Paul Boateng and Harriet Harman.
The idea was to dump ‘the formality and staid dignity of the typical solicitors’ office’ and to ‘present an informal, casual atmosphere’, wrote Zander. So law centres occupied the high street and shopping centres with shop-front exteriors, not with discreet name plaques but boldly declaring themselves ‘law centres’. Their office walls would be festooned with posters promoting housing rights, support for battered wives and campaigns for racial equality. Zander noted that the furniture tended towards the ‘somewhat dilapidated’ and the lawyers and support staff ‘all tend to wear jeans and unconventional hairstyles’. The spirit of the law centres – not to mention the furniture and some of the haircuts – remains unchanged.
Life on the ground for law centres has always been a struggle for survival. ‘But now it seems the curtain is finally coming down on us,’ says Ashe. Last year its three branches, which receive 68% of their funding from the LSC, helped more than 26,000 people ‘at an average cost of less than £70 a case’. The new funding arrangements introduced last October represented a cut of their funding by one third, he reckons, and as a result they could end up ‘just another excellent public service that was driven to extinction’.
Ruth Hayes, manager at Islington, says: 'The system is in crisis and the viability of law centres providing access to legal aid is in the balance.’ She argues that the move from hourly rates to fixed fees is putting her case workers under huge pressure and has led to the centre changing ‘overnight’, from being over-performing (having exceeded its ‘hours’ contract by 6%) to failing. ‘In some areas of law we need to do four times as many cases to bring in the same income,’ she says.
‘Now we’re working on fixed fees we’re flat out trying all sorts of advice sessions, but the reality is that lots of our clients have complex problems. They’re in distress, have mental-health issues, disabilities, don’t speak English as a first language or aren’t fluent. We simply can’t get an outcome which is worth having for them in the time we’ve got.’ Hayes cites the £171 fixed fee for homelessness cases. ‘It is often costing us between £350 and £400,’ she says. ‘So every case we open we’re losing several hundred pounds.’
The other widely reported big issue concerns the transitional arrangements put in place by the LSC to ease the cash-flow predicament of moving from hourly rates to fixed fees. Under the scheme, not-for-profit agencies receive a ‘buffer’ of three times the average monthly payment over an 18-month period. This is causing headaches because the buffer is being continually reassessed and decreasing as case numbers drop. One manager complains: ‘It has been overcomplicated, taken a long time to get clarity and when it finally did become clearer it became obvious that it wasn’t going to enable effective transition for the most prepared organisation with reserves which most not-for-profit agencies can’t be.’ This manager’s centre had been paid £160,000, but has only earned £50,000. According to the Law Centres Federation, some 15 centres already exceeded their buffer by March.
The LSC readily acknowledges that law centres, with their dependence on public funding and not-for-profit ethos, are particularly vulnerable to the shake-up in funding arrangements. Until recently, legal aid only contributed about 20% of law centre funding. However, a slow-but-steady erosion of local authority support (not to mention the odd crippling cut) means that the LSC now provides about half of their money. ‘We have no desire for good organisations delivering a good service with good-quality access and value for money to be struggling,’ says Crispin Passmore, director of the Community Legal Service and former manager of Coventry Law Centre. ‘But it’s important that we are clear about the many different things contributing to the situation. One of which is an ability to cope with change to fit with what we want to deliver.’
Passmore told BBC Radio 4’s ‘You and Yours’ he was ‘confident’ no law centres would close because of fixed fees. However, he says, that is not really the point: ‘The test for me is not whether agencies pull out, but can we get other people to come in and do the work at the fixed fees? Because if they can on a sustainable basis, that’s a successful transition.’
That is unlikely to be a consoling thought for those lawyers and advice workers who have committed their careers to working in the not-for-profit sector. But what is at stake?
The idea of a network for national law centres was first conceived 40 years ago. Michael Zander QC, emeritus professor of law at the LSE, was the first person in this country to write about and commend US-style neighbourhood law firms (Socialist Commentary, September 1966). He was also the main author of the Society of Labour Lawyers’ seminal pamphlet Justice for All (1968), which led directly to the establishment of the first law centre two years later. This worked well in the era of consensus politics – the Conservative party also argued in the paper Rough Justice that the legal system had to reach out to the poor to remedy ‘the failure of many people who need legal advice to ever get to a solicitor’s office’.
Taking the law to the kind of communities that were essentially excluded from legal services was the main purpose of law centres and so, fittingly, the first centre opened in a butcher’s shop on a run-down street in West London at the north end of Portobello Road in 1970. This was pre-gentrification Notting Hill, where the new immigrants rubbed along uneasily with white working class communities living in substandard housing, much of which was provided by notorious landlords such as Peter Rachman. It was a world vividly captured in a 1974 World in Action film called ‘Law Shop’, which bluntly labelled the semi-derelict network of terrace houses in the shadow of then new A40 Westway a ‘slum area’.
The opening of North Kensington Law Centre on Goldborne Road in 1970 was a big deal. The event was presided over by the president of the Law Society, Godfrey Morley, and the Labour Attorney General, Sir Elwyn Jones, with personal messages of support from the Lord Chancellor, Lord Hailsham and chairman of the Law Commission, Sir Leslie Scarman. The creation of the network of law centres was a highly idealistic attempt to take the law to the socially excluded and an antidote to fusty solicitors’ offices which seemed then to be stuck in a 1950s time-warp (see b0x, left).
Many private practice solicitors originally recoiled at this new breed of legal radicals. In its 1973 annual report, the Law Society, which administered the legal aid fund, decried their core ethos of ‘responsibility to their local communities’ as a subversive means of ‘stirring up political and quasi-political confrontation far removed from ensuring equal access to the protection of the law’.
Chancery Lane felt ‘incredibly threatened’ by the prospect of salaried lawyers, recalls Smith. ‘They responded very quickly by persuading the government to fund the legal advice scheme,’ he says. In 1973, Chancery Lane got its own advice and assistance scheme sanctioned by the government, which became known as a ‘green form’ scheme. It provided that advice on any matter of law could be made available on the basis of a simplified means test carried out by the solicitor. As Smith sees it, the Law Society controlled the law centres by conditions attached to the ‘waiver’ required by solicitors to be employed in law centres. There was a stand-off in 1975 over the establishment of Hillingdon Law Centre, and a deal was brokered whereby the not-for-profit side promised to keep off private practice patches such as crime, family work, personal injury, probate and conveyancing.
As Zander now puts it, the ‘initially fraught relationship between the law centre movement and the private profession gradually transmogrified into a very supportive relationship’. The law centre movement was up and running and another 13 centres opened between 1973 and 1974. By 1989 there were 60.
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Is there still a role for the law centre today? ‘Some people do find walking into a solicitor’s office very intimidating,’ says Richard Miller, the Law Society’s legal aid manager. ‘The law centre still provides a much friendlier approach and somewhere where clients don’t feel like they are a nuisance with their little problems – that’s an attitude that we are always trying to overcome.’
There might be a role, but Miller fears that there is no future for them in this post-reform world. ‘One of my concerns is the move towards a single entity under CLACs and CLANs is that the local law centre will either not get the contract, in which case it will not get the local authority funding and may well be out of business, or it is going to have to merge into this new entity, in which case it ceases to exist. For this reason it seems the CLACs and CLANs agenda is inconsistent with the existence of law centres.’
Would Miller subscribe to the view that law centres are in such a predicament at the moment because they are simply not as efficient as business-minded private practice? ‘No, absolutely not,’ he says.
The problem is apparent; it is the solution that seems hard to find. Law centres have gone to whichever body could give funding, and now the begging bowl is nearly empty and the donors are packing up.
Sean Canning is director of North Kensington law centre, which remains at that former butcher’s shop on Portobello Road. About 70% of his law centre’s funding comes from the LSC. ‘As one of the most established law centres, we have gone through very difficult funding cycles and have had difficulties attracting local authority support for years,’ he says. ‘This has meant that we have become very dependent on LSC funding and the rapid changes to that funding pose potential threats to viability.’
This, he argues, has created the current crisis. The new model of fixed fees is ‘predicated on finding very short, rapid turnaround cases’ and runs counter to the law centre model. ‘Unfortunately,’ he says, ‘our case profile doesn’t fit that model.’
Jon Robins is a freelance journalist and director of communications and campaigns for the Legal Action Group
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