With the system of civil legal aid and pro bono work staring into the abyss, Sue Bucknall issues an urgent plea for support from the profession

On the day the London Millennium Bridge opened, I was privileged to be one of the first to cross it.

I was on a charity walk and the bridge was opened early for the walkers.

The day was sunny; the bridge was perfect.

On my return six hours later, it was a different story.

It was almost impossible to get on to the bridge because of the huge numbers who wanted to share the experience.

I sampled the now- famous 'wobble', which resulted in closure for strengthening work.

So what is the connection between pro bono and the Millennium Bridge? At the time of crossing the bridge, the Solicitors Pro Bono Group (SPBG) was a fairly new and manageable charity.

Its aim, as now, was to support, encourage and motivate solicitors to do pro bono work.

And it put forward a series of projects that would enable all lawyers, young and old, from small and large firms, in-house and private practice, to participate in pro bono work if they wished.

Thanks to the success of the projects, about 16,000 people are helped annually by our pro bono lawyers, and this number could be greatly expanded.

But here is the difficulty.

Public legal funding has not followed the same path.

Whole areas of advice deserts have been created where people find there is no legal advice available in the area they need or no solicitors who have spare capacity to deal with their problems.

For many of these people, pro bono is the only answer, and we are overwhelmed by those who have tried to get legal advice from every other source.

As a small charity, we cannot hope to meet this ever-increasing demand.

These days, desperate people with various problems are coming to us, which was not the case a few years ago.

The solicitors we turn to are receiving more and more requests and these same solicitors are the ones that fund the charity as we receive no annual funding from the Law Society or its charity.

(The Bar Pro Bono Unit is funded by the Bar Council.) Therefore, it is understandable that we have reached crisis point.

We do not like to turn anybody away as we know there is nowhere else for them to go.

So what is the answer?

Like the Millennium Bridge, the system of pro bono needs to be strengthened.

In a recent SPBG paper entitled 'A Stitch in Time' - that used Law Society research - I calculated that the average lawyer gives 31 hours of pro bono advice annually.

Even at legal aid rates, this amounts to 150 million of genuinely free legal advice being given at the present time.

The solicitors most likely to conduct pro bono work are those who spend more than 75% of their time on legally aided clients.

The creation of advice deserts means solicitors are disappearing from the publicly funded arena and those few who are staying are able to give less and less time to pro bono work.

Research from Citizens Advice and AdviceUK supports the view that advice deserts are creating pro bono deserts.

If nothing is done urgently, then our system, both of civil legal aid and pro bono, is in danger of becoming like the Millennium Dome - that is to say, a good idea meant for all but, in fact, only accessible by a few.

Without a long-term sustainable plan, civil legal aid and pro bono will - like the dome - become merely a white elephant forced to close.

In National Pro Bono Week 2003, the national press said that pro bono was a concept whose time had come.

The time has also come for the stitch needed from the profession, its professional body and the government if we are going to have a legal system to be proud of for the next millennium.

Sue Bucknall is chief executive of the Solicitors Pro Bono Group