Lawyers have greeted with caution the news that telephone and on-site advice services for detained immigrants and asylum seekers have been put up for tender by the Legal Services Commission (LSC).


The invitations to tender for exclusive contracts to provide the services followed completion of six-month pilot schemes during which 4,877 detainees in police stations received telephone advice and 725 detainees in immigration removal centres (IRCs) had on-site assistance. Contracts will run from 1 April 2008 to 31 March 2010.



Jackie Peirce, a partner at south London firm Glazer Delmar and executive committee member of the Immigration Law Practitioners Association, welcomed the LSC's recognition that there was a lack of provision in police stations and IRCs. She added: 'We are concerned, however, that exclusive contracts would both restrict choice for clients and make it easy for quality standards to slip.



'Money, as always, is another key issue and the main reason why so many firms are giving up publicly funded work of this sort.'



Crispin Passmore, head of the LSC's Community Legal Service, said: 'We need to meet the, often urgent, needs of this very vulnerable group in a co-ordinated way, but if we are to maintain a sustainable service we must also be meticulous about demonstrating value for money.'



Meanwhile, legal videoconferencing pioneer Marlan Higgins has won the opportunity to pilot his Legal Advice Direct (LAD) model of web-based remote multimedia legal access with the Border and Immigration Agency (BIA). The BIA will use the network to see if it can conduct elements of young people and children's asylum applications over the web.



From this week until late January, a proportion of the asylum claims from Oxford and Croydon processed at a west London BIA office will be conducted using LAD. The eight-week trial is to test whether the number of trips made by asylum seekers and their publicly funded chaperones can be cut using the videoconferencing method.



Jonathan Rayner and Rupert White