Cost centre

The opening of new law centres has brought to a head the issue of funding.

Should established centres get more? Michael Gerrard discovers that most are already on a financial tightrope

With the government increasingly emphasising the role of the not-for-profit sector in delivering legal services, it is hardly surprising that a raft of new law centres are opening up.

However, it turns out that such newcomers are but fresh icing on an ever-diminishing cake.

The Law Centres Federation (LCF) announced last month the opening of three offices in Greater Manchester at Bury, Stockport and Trafford, with others to follow in Surrey and Aberystwyth next year.

This may come as a surprise to those who read reports last year of financial squeezes on existing centres, highlighted by the closure of the Middlesbrough office last August.

And according to the Law Centres Federation, optimism is misplaced.

Yes, centres largely financed by central government funding via the Legal Services Commission (LSC) and its Community Legal Service (CLS) are opening, but only in areas where none existed before.

Despite the support of wealthy firms and the periodic interest of the press, established law centres face longer-term questions about funding provisions.

Bob Nightingale, recently departed LCF chairman and head of Wandsworth and Merton Law Centre in south London, welcomes the new centres, but warns of the troubles facing the established offices, which lack government largesse.

'The existing law centres are struggling, because of the reductions in local authority funding,' he says.

Much of the problem lies with the government's largely negative view of the law, he says, adding: 'The government does not like law and compares what we do at the centres with the activities of big City law firms - but most law centre lawyers earn less than tube drivers.'

Against this negative backdrop, he points out that demand for the kind of work performed by law centres is always likely to exceed supply.

Law centres were pioneered in the UK during the early 1970s, following on from US initiatives, and are designed to help people with social welfare problems.

Usually, these are people on low incomes unable to fund legal inquiries privately.

A core of trained lawyers staff the centres; these are hard-working and crusading lawyers, who draw salaries of usually no more than 30,000 a year.

The opening of Trafford Law Centre came about, as is the case with its new neighbours, as a result of research carried out by the LSC.

This found that there was a considerable lack of spending on legal services in those areas given the apparent demand, as shown by the numbers of residents claiming income support and job seekers' allowance.

The Trafford centre is operating out of temporary offices and is largely funded by government cash in the form of contracts from the CLS, worth up to 200,000 a year and covering areas including immigration, housing and employment.

The centre's practice manager, Michelle Carrahar, says: 'We are already finding that people are coming to us and we are getting close to our contracted number of hours, even without publicity.

'This indicates that obviously there is a demand for the services we provide.'

The centre at present is staffed by one senior solicitor and a couple of case workers, though it is hoping to take on a community worker to liaise on what kind of services the residents want.

It plans to move into permanent premises early in 2003.

Meanwhile the established centres - largely funded by local authority grants and charitable donations - continue to find things tough.

A case in point is Hackney Law Centre, which is just recovering from the shock it suffered last year, when financial meltdown at the London Borough of Hackney meant that the lion's share of its funding - a grant of 160,000 from the council - was pulled overnight.

It took more than seven months of hard lobbying of both central government and other bodies before the cash tap was switched on again, albeit at a reduced rate, by the quango that had taken over Hackney's administrative functions.

Pip Salvador-Jones, a housing solicitor at Hackney Law Centre, explains that new centres may indeed be opening, but problems remain for the law centre movement as a whole.

She says: 'Technically, the older centres are losing out to the new ones.

What is the point of bringing centres to areas where they are needed to the detriment of other more established centres, which are going down because of the vagaries of the funding system?'

She adds that in terms of work, in an area of high-deprivation like Hackney, demand for housing, welfare benefits, immigration and employment grows at a pace which the eternally strapped-for- cash centre finds difficult to support.

However, those working in the new centres deny that they are getting some kind of favoured treatment.

Trafford's Michelle Carrahar says: 'We are not sitting on a golden egg.

Everything we do is carried out on a shoestring.

That is why we are looking for more diversified sources of funding.'

Apart from lack of funds, the centres face challenges from the government's development of its CLS Partnership.

These partnerships compromise not only the centres and voluntary advice bodies such as the Citizens Advice Bureaux, but also private practice legal aid practitioners.

This latter section has shrunk rapidly in recent years, owing to the perceived poor rates for legal aid work, hence increased demands on law centres and the other groups.

The Legal Aid Practitioners Group confirms the situation is getting worse.

Chairman David Emmerson says: 'The inevitable thing is that a good private law firm is able to step away from legal aid work to do more lucrative forms of private work, especially in the area of family law.'

He adds that far from being rivals, private practitioners and law centres are part of the same package and often refer work to each other, so problems are posed by departing private practitioners.

Some relief is provided for legal aid practitioners and law centres alike by aid and assistance from other lawyers who offer their services pro bono.

Many of these volunteer lawyers come from the plusher surroundings of the blue-chip City firms more readily associated with multi-million pound corporate deals than the housing problems of a single mother in the inner City.

Cynics might perceive such work to be an attempt to gain positive public relations, to which City firms reply that as this trend has been proceeding for the best part of a decade, it is so commonplace as to lack novelty value or the ability to command many column inches.

The corporate giants more usually claim that by performing such voluntary work they are merely doing their civic duty.

Clifford Chance partner Mark Campbell says: 'It is essentially right for us to be getting involved.

Law may be a business, but it is also a profession - and as lawyers we have a wider social function than just making money.'

Mr Campbell adds that increasingly corporate clients enquire about Clifford Chance's pro bono provision, and are anxious to see that their legal adviser is a well-rounded organisation.

Feedback from those City solicitors who volunteer reveals they too gain something from the experience, not least the chance to break free from the corporate goldfish bowl.

Support is further provided by the Solicitors Pro Bono Group and the LCF through its joint operation LawWorks, which provides training for corporate lawyers in social welfare issues.

All these sources of help may enable the established law centres to keep their heads above water for a little longer.

But the government may have to look again at funding if more closures are to be avoided in future.

Michael Gerrard is a freelance journalist