Last month justice minister Jonathan Djanogly highlighted ‘the need to redefine and reposition the future role of not-for-profit agencies and their work’ as the government prepares to ‘reframe’ legal aid.

He’d better get a move on; or is it too late already? A few short weeks later and ‘reposition’ and ‘reframe’ read suspiciously like euphemisms here, just as one might assert that a sacked employee has been subject to ‘involuntary outplacement’.

As we report today, at least a third of the country’s 56 law centres – and possibly many more – are expected to go to the wall as the cuts bite. It’s difficult if not impossible for the centres to downsize; they live hand to mouth and have no reserves. What we must contemplate is a process of mass dissolution, most probably in very short order.

Tens of thousands of the ‘Big Society’s’ most disadvantaged people will be left vulnerable in consequence. Indeed, this is already happening, with Law for All and the Immigration Advisory Service both gone.

In that same speech, Djanogly declared that it will ‘be possible to define a new, general social welfare law advice provision, outside of the redrawn legal aid scheme’.

How, by when and for whom, minister? Do tell us.