Around 50 selected non-solicitor agencies are to be invited to apply for legal aid franchises.

A Legal Aid Board pilot - which is being set up with the support of the Advice Services Alliance (ASA), an umbrella group representing the biggest agencies, is to run for a year, starting in January 1995.LAB chief executive Steve Orchard says one aim of the scheme is to see whether law firms can learn from the way agencies operate.

'Agencies don't think like solicitors when they deal with the legal aid scheme.

Agencies tend to take a holistic approach to clients' problems, which may range across a number of areas of law.

Whereas the legal profession thinks in terms of clients as a number of cases,' said Mr Orchard.According to the board's policy officer Allison McGarrity, the pilot is also intended to help plug a gap in existing legal aid provision.

Agencies will not be expected to compete in solicitors' key areas of work, say, personal injury or matrimonial, but in areas which have been their traditional sphere of expertise, predominantly social welfare law.'We are committed to providing access for people in all areas of law that legal aid covers.

This extension of providers must give us more opportunity to meet our objectives,' she says.

The board has not said how much the pilot project is costing, but, according to Steve Orchard, it is being funded with new money.Agencies taking part in the scheme will have to meet the same quality standards as franchised law firms, adhering to the same transaction criteria and going through the same auditing procedures.

They will also have to meet time recording, monitoring and training requirements.Ms McGarrity says: 'We are not talking about dual standards.' However, the arrangements differ from those for firms in that the board will pay the agencies on a block funding, rather than per case, basis.

Interested agencies - of which there are though to be around 500 - are being asked to put in bids for funding to take on extra case workers to do the additional work.Ms McGarrity says that, although the agencies will be expected to be able to justify their bids, there will be no price competition, at least not in the initial stages of the scheme.She adds that the payment arrangements under the scheme should not be seen as indicative of any commitment to block funding as a way forward.'When we set up the pilot, we had to do it in the context of the way agencies are currently working at the moment.

The way we are funding in the pilot should not be taken as an indication in any way of how we will fund in the future,' she said.However, although the board does not appear to rule out price competition in the longer term, the ASA would be concerned if the pilot, which it supports, were to lead in this direction.ASA policy officer Richard Jenner says: 'In the advice sector, we don't want to get ourselves in the position where we enter into price competition between ourselves.

Nor do we see this as going down the road where it would be easier to encourage competition between us and the legal profession.'Advice agencies do not see themselves as a way for the board to provide legal advice on the cheap.

'It is not necessarily the case that advice agencies will work out cheaper.

If we are to provide the kind of quality of service that the board is looking for, we are talking about experienced workers with specialist skills.

We would be looking for that to be properly remunerated in any future scheme,' he says.Mr Jenner accepts, however, that t his may be a problem.

'At the moment, one of the difficulties is that there is not a standard rate for the job in the advice sector.' The ASA is currently trying to negotiate with the board to ensure that 'there isn't under- funding built into the pilot'.Despite these reservations, the ASA is generally enthusiastic about the scheme, seeing it as an opportunity for agencies to meet currently unmet needs.Roger Smith, director of Legal Action Group, also welcomes the scheme, but with reservations.

'As a research project, it is highly commendable.

However, that does not alter the fact that I think it is potentially dangerous,' he says.Mr Smith is concerned that having franchises and becoming reliant on funding from the board may change the character of advice agencies, which have traditionally covered areas not under the remit of legal aid.

He questions whether the section has fully thought through the implications.Lyn Devonald, chairman of the Legal Aid Practitioners Group, is concerned at the quality of advice that the agencies may give.

'If people are going to advice agencies, we have got to be sure that the quality of advice is equivalent to what the board is looking for from solicitors.

We are not afraid of competition, as long as it's fair competition,' he said.