ROBERT VERKAIK TESTS THE ADVICE SECTOR'S RESPONSE TO REFORM PROPOSALS CONTAINED IN THE ACCESS TO JUSTICE BILLThe Lord Chancellor's plan to create a community legal service so that everybody in the country has access to social and legal advice has been universally welcomed by the 'not-for-profit' advice sector.Much of the policy, outlined in the white paper and published in the Access to Justice Bill just before Christmas, was what many of the agencies working in this sector had been advocating for years.David Harker, chief executive of the National Association of Citizens Advice Bureaux (NACAB), says the government vision is very much the voluntary sector's own blueprint for change.'Growing numbers of CAB and other voluntary sector advice agencies,' says Mr Harker, 'are already providing what is in effect a community legal service, with volunteers, paid lay advisers and solicitors working together from co-ordinate d advice centres.'There are in fact 700 main CAB with an additional 1,759 outlets, more than 800 independent advice centres and 53 law centres.

However, they have all grown up randomly, based on where funding has been available and what type of funding that has been.

This sector currently receives £150 million a year from a variety of different funding sources, including the National Lottery Charities Funding Board, central government, the Legal Aid Board and private business.The government argues in its white paper, 'Modernising Justice', that most of this provision is not based on a 'rational assessment' of need and leads to an uneven distribution of advice services across the country.Identifying the current system's shortcomings, the Lord Chancellor claims that the fragmented and unplanned nature of the advice sector prevents the various funders and providers of services from 'working together to achieve the maximum value and effect overall'.

The government is now seeking, through consensus from the many funders, to develop this sector centrally.

It also wants to establish new standard marks to ensure a quality of control over the advice being provided.Vicki Chapman, policy director at the Legal Action Group, says that what must not happen is that those areas traditionally deprived of access to legal advice -- for example, parts of north Wales and the west country -- should continue to be at a disadvantage.

Ms Chapman says: 'For a long time we have been critical of the lack of strategic policy in the delivery of legal services.

They will now have to go into areas where there is no provision and start up services from scratch.'Jay Sharma, director of the Law Centres Federation, questions whether the Lord Chancellor has committed enough extra financing to sustain his ambitious plans.

He says the Lord Chancellor's promise of an additional £20 million allocation to be ring fenced for the voluntary sector, is really only £3 million because the figure already includes legal aid funding to the advice sector.'We are not talking about a level playing field so much as a half-turfed pitch,' says Mr Sharma.

He also emphasises the need to provide 'depth of coverage' as well as a full spread of services.Mr Harker echoes Mr Sharma's concern that the money will not be there to implement a fully integrated network.

'The CAB service will want to be assured that the framework which replaces the present legal aid scheme is properly funded to do the job,' he says.Ms Chapman argues that one way to help guarantee a more even and reliable funding base is to impose a duty on all local authorities to make a financial contribution or to help provide a community legal service.

'At the moment some local authorities are good at this while others are very bad,' she says.The voluntary sector has also expressed concern about the number of specialist solicitors who will inevitably pull out of legal aid work when they realise they do too little to qualify for a community legal service contract.

The Legal Action Group says it will be solicitors who mostly do private client work with a little legal aid work on the side who will be forced to withdraw from this service.

'There are some very good specialist employment lawyers [working in legal aid franchised firms], who under the government's plans are not guaranteed a legal aid contract, who will decide there are too many hurdles to overcome and instead concentrate on their private clients.'There is also disquiet regarding the definition of 'need' which some representatives of the voluntary agen cies argue will not be wide enough to ensure that communities do not fall through the community legal service net.

The current social deprivation indices include figures for income support, housing benefit, ethnic minorities and the range of voluntary advice services available.

'There is some confusion about general advice services and legal services.

A service which includes a leaflet on self-help for a housing problem, for example, is not the same as a legal service,' says Mr Sharma.The question of funding is a complex matter for the voluntary sector.

The return to the contributory green form advice and assistance scheme, bringing it into line with the contributory regime of the certificated scheme, has its own problems.Although it means more people will be eligible for early advice and assistance, the reinstated contributory element means agencies such as the law centres can no longer sell themselves as a service which is 'free at the point of delivery'.

Mr Sharma says it might be that people are discouraged from taking up help if they believe they might have to make a contribution.

To some extent organisations such as the Citizens Advice Bureaux, which have been involved in the Legal Aid Board's pilot scheme, have already encountered a myriad of funding and resource problems.One of these is disparity in funding.

According to a report published by NACAB, bureaux in the north west of England receive 92.5p per head of the population while bureaux in the London area receive £2.42.

NACAB claims that LAB's proposals to produce a more equitable distribution of social welfare legal advice and assistance under the block contracting scheme would mean the Legal Aid Board's Liverpool office losing nearly £1 million or 13% of its total funding.The CAB national network provides more legal advice and assistance that would qualify under the legal aid green form rules than all the solicitors in the whole of the country.

When the new funding arrangements are enacted, the voluntary sector will discover what law firms have known for a long time -- there is never enough legal aid to go round.NICHOLAS MURRAY FINDS OUT WHAT CAREER OPPORTUNITIES THE ADVICE SECTOR IS ABLE TO OFFER YOUNG SOCIAL WELFARE SOLICITORS'At the end of the day,' says Jacqueline Stephenson of Chesterfield Law Centre, 'I didn't want to work in private practice.

It's a business, it's about making money -- and that wasn't why I wanted to be a solicitor.' Working in a law centre, she finds, provides opportunity for high quality work that is far more interesting, more varied, and more socially useful than anything she experienced in private practice.If the advice centre umbrella organisations such as the Law Centres Federation, the National Association of Citizens Advice Bureaux (NACAB), and the Federation of Independent Advice Centres are right, then the government's proposed community legal service will offer the sector the chance to expand so that many more solicitors will be following Jacqueline Stephenson's example.The exact number of solicitors employed full-time in advice centres -- which can include citizens' advice bureaux, law centres, Shelter housing aid centres, Age Concern centres, and a range of independent agencies -- is not known.

The umbrella organisations admit they do not keep a tally, but NACAB knows that in 380 bureaux -- more than half -- paid solicitor hours are available, though this does not indicate how many full-time posts are funded.

In addition, there is a great deal of pro bono work done in advice centres on a voluntary basis.

Trainee solic itors can count hours spent in this way towards their training contracts.

With more than 50 law centres nationwide, employing on average three solicitors each, the potential job market in advice centres is small but significant.For those who have either made the move from the private sector to the advice centre world, or have spent time in it, there are no signs of regret.

Veena Allison, a solicitor who worked in the Cheltenham CAB, says she was attracted by the opportunity to get involved in what were to her the more interesting areas of housing and employment law, and by the chance to make a difference to the lives of people getting a raw deal in housing and employment.

In private practice, she said, she had too often ended up representing employers.

'I sometimes got the feeling I was working for the wrong side,' says Ms Allison.

Many of the clients seeking legal advice from the CAB simply have no other option if they do not qualify for legal aid.From a more personal, professional point of view, the CAB gives experience of social welfare law that could not be gained in private practice.

Younger solicitors also find they are gaining experience in management that in private practice would only be available at partner level.

They can also learn financial accounting skills and get more advocacy experience.

The lack of pigeon-holing means that advice centre solicitors take on a range of tasks with the result, says Ms Allison, that solicitors are 'far more likely to reach your full potential'.Another important factor attracting solicitors to employment in advice centres is the radically different management ethos.

Although what Jay Sharma of the Law Centre Federation calls 'the old 70s cliche' of the collectivist law centre -- people in beards spending half a day in a meeting to discuss the sourcing of recycled jotters -- has long receded, the co-operative structures are still there.

Ms Sharma says that working in a law centre today such as North Kensington or Brent in London, where the work is more focussed and where there is more sophisticated use of IT and time-recording, is to find oneself in an agency that 'matches up with efficient legal aid practices at the cutting edge'.Nonetheless, the co-operative ethic is still there.

The sense of working to a common purpose, in non-hierarchical structures, where responsibilities and tasks are shared, is in stark contrast to the pursuit of more individual rather than collective targets in private practice.

Too often, fee earners in law firms believe that the targets set staff against each other.

'It's like publishing exam results on a noticeboard,' says Ms Allison.Staff in advice centres say that they work just as hard and just as long hours as their private sector colleagues but gain the satisfaction of knowing that what they are doing has a more visible result in the community.

Sarah Chandler, a solicitor at Plumstead Law Centre, says that her housing work, helping vulnerable people at moments of crisis regarding to evictions and repossessions is work 'at the sharp end'.

For her, the radically different way of working, with staff 'supporting each other' through regular meetings which are about participatory decision-making not rare occasions where a senior partner 'delivers information to everyone', is at the core of the difference between the sectors.

Also, the fact that management committees are drawn from the local community deepens the sense of involvement with that community.

Progressive employment practices are another attraction for some.

The pay may not be great but longer h olidays or the increasingly rare phenomenon of time off in lieu are a reminder that decent working conditions need not be considered utopian at the end of the 1990s.However, not everyone is convinced that the picture is so rosy.

Veena Allison was shocked when she 'phoned the employment agency with which she was registered to inform them that she had got a job with the CAB.

'This will damage your career,' she was told.

Some friends even tried to dissuade her.

The idea that leaving the private sector for the advice centre world is a bad career move that will result in de-skilling, evidently exists in some quarters.

The implication is that lawyers taking this path cannot take the pace.Those, like Jacqueline Stephenson, who have done so, shrug this off.

She insists she works just as hard and as effectively, drawing on the full range of skills as a lawyer that she would draw on in private practice.

But where her entire workload before was casework, in the law centre it amounts to perhaps 80%.

The rest of her time allows her to do development work such as a project on access to housing advice for older people.

Far from de-skilling she is acquiring new skills such as conducting judicial reviews and challenging council decisions.

The work is simply 'more interesting, at the cutting edge'.Although the financial imperative, as all these solicitors stress, is not paramount, they cannot be oblivious to funding realities.

To work for a community advice centre is often to live dangerously.

Local authorities can sometimes be disposed to pull the plug on an advice centre which is repaying its grant by taking the council to court.

Not every local authority is willing to sponsor a thorn in its side.The future funding of community legal advice is now up for debate and in some areas, councils are getting together with local agencies to plan an integrated approach.

Funding, of course, comes from other sources.In spite of the remarks about the private sector made by Advice Centre lawyers, many big City law firms fund local advice centres, apart from the significant amounts of pro bono work their staff contribute.

According to Tony Sacker, chairman of the City of London Law Society, City firms are pouring 'tens of thousands' of pounds into funding the Tower Hamlets Law Centre in Whitechapel, the Solicitors Pro Bono Group, and innovative schemes like the CAB located in the Royal Courts of Justice which gives litigants in person access to solicitors.

At a more local level many legal aid practices are keen to support local advice centres as a source of referrals.All the signs are that in the future more solicitors will want to work for advice centres and that there will be more opportunities for them to do so.

'It's an inspiring experience to go through,' says Veena Allison.

'It's strange that more solicitors haven't cottoned on to that.'