Law Centres: Poor relations

Law centres across the country are turning people away, overwhelmed by demand. Rebuffing potential clients is not a choice. Lawyers, support staff and volunteers take on what they can, picking up the pieces of a national housing and homelessness crisis, a failed asylum system, and a sustained rise in the cost of living that is a personal economic tragedy for many.

The centres’ problems are exacerbated by difficulties in recruiting and retaining lawyers. Then there is their compartmentalised funding, which means they must spend inordinate amounts of time applying for grants. They compete with one another for funds and staff.

Patrick Marples, chief executive of South West London Law Centres, speaks for many when he says: ‘The centre is currently overwhelmed by high levels of demand.’ Despite the efforts of staff, he admits that the centre is ‘only scratching the surface of the legal needs of our community’.

Audrey Ludwig, the founder of Suffolk Law Centre, says: ‘I cannot give numbers but we are turning people with legal issues away in our region constantly.’  

Law centres deal with legal problems across the board, ranging from welfare benefits, housing, employment, asylum and immigration, to the fallout from relationship breakdowns.

However, the root cause of most of these problems is poverty – and the failure of governments to implement policies that alleviate it. ‘Almost everything we do relates to poverty or another inequality that intersects with poverty,’ says Karen Bowers, director of Bristol Law Centre.

Quoting the US lawyer and human rights activist Bryan Stevenson, Ludwig adds: ‘The opposite of poverty is not wealth, it’s justice.’ In her leaving speech in October, she said: ‘It is quoted on the Law Centres Network website and it resonates with me.’

Poverty, explains Ludwig, ‘means you are always one moment away from disaster. So unpaid wages, acquiring a disability, an eviction notice, your parent not getting your birth registered as a child – [all] can lead to multiple adverse consequences.’

Being poor also means having ‘less social capital so you cannot get help from friends, family or colleagues. It often means an absence of a working phone or not having the bus fare into the nearest town’ and ‘no safety nets’.

Solving clients’ interlinked problems, says Ludwig, ‘requires working communication devices, phone credit or a local library with free internet access’, as well as ‘high degrees of legal literacy and comprehension in English, together with health and resilience to deal with all the bureaucracies and knockbacks’.  

Most law centre clients lack these essentials. ‘We regularly have to provide foodbank vouchers and cash grants to clients to cover the cost of phone credit, the internet and bus fares, just so we can undertake casework with them and address their financial emergencies,’ says Ludwig.

Millions of households are under financial strain, because many of life’s basics are now far more expensive in real terms than they were before the pandemic. Falling inflation means only that prices rise more slowly, a fact seemingly misunderstood by many.

Rising need

Department for Work and Pensions data for the UK shows that around one in six people was in relative poverty before housing costs in 2022/23. This rises to just over one in five once housing costs are accounted for.

The number of people in food-insecure households rose by around 2.5 million people between 2021/22 and 2022/23, from 4.7 million to 7.2 million.

The biggest difficulty, reports Sue Allard, senior debt solicitor at Derbyshire Law Centre, is that most clients have a ‘negative budget’. This means they have less money coming in than they need, even for essentials.

‘The increase in fuel costs has been almost impossible to manage,’ says Allard. She sees a ‘constant stream of people being asked to pay completely unaffordable amounts each month’, giving rise to paralysing anxiety and poor mental health.

Policy and practice at the DWP are at the root of many clients’ problems. Centres report that deductions made from benefits, as well as sanctions by the DWP and reviews which can stop benefits for months, are driving people who are already on the edge deeper into debt and depression.

Poor decision-making is also to blame, says Pamela Fitzpatrick, director at Harrow Law Centre, which has an almost 100% success rate at social security tribunals. Harrow, she claims, is also experiencing problems arising from school exclusions, the increased use of fines and prosecutions for truancy, and inappropriate use of Public Spaces Protection Orders to generate income for the council.

In common with others, North East Law Centre is seeing a rise in in-work poverty, says director Michael Fawole. He reports ‘routinely’ referring to food banks people who are in work but still cannot make ends meet. For many in the north-east, he says, work that increasingly involves jobs with zero-hours or short-term contracts and casual labour, simply does not pay enough.

Homelessness is another big issue, due to the shortage of council housing in many areas. ‘The housing crisis is huge,’ says Vicky Fewkes, a supervising solicitor at west London’s Ealing Law Centre. ‘People are just desperate.’

Interlinked problems

Most law centre clients come with a cluster of complex problems. These have been made worse, says Liz Reed, chief executive of Merseyside Law Centre, by the lack of funding for early access to legal advice.

Yet legal aid contracting arrangements make it impossible for centres to deal holistically with a client’s problems. They must have a separate contract for each category of law they want to advise in, and many criticise the ‘outdated and unnecessary’ requirements for supervisors in each area.

‘We cannot get supervisors, regardless of the offered salary, as they simply do not exist or are already employed elsewhere,’ says Olivia Pulley-Crowther, managing director and senior solicitor at Wiltshire Law Centre.

The problem is made worse by legal aid rates which have not increased for decades. In addition, notes Sally Denton, a senior solicitor at Nottingham Law Centre: ‘The tendering process means that everyone is scrambling around for supervisors at the same time.’

Low salaries make recruitment an ‘endless struggle’, says Pauline Gilson, director at Luton Law Centre. ‘There are lawyers who would like to work in social welfare law but cannot afford to do so or are only able to work part-time for a law centre,’ she observes. Centres therefore have the ‘constant worry’ about how they will recruit a replacement if a supervisor leaves.

Advice deserts

The Legal Aid, Sentencing and Punishment of Offenders Act 2012 (LASPO), which took whole swathes of law out of scope of public funding, and low fees that make legal aid work financially unsustainable for many private practice firms, have left ‘advice deserts’ across the country.

LASPO also had a huge impact on law centres, which lost much of the funding that had come from legal aid. They faced the double-whammy of reduced local authority funding, a knock-on effect of austerity.

In 2012, there were 54 law centre offices across the country. By 2024 that had fallen to 42 – even though an average of one new centre has opened each year since LASPO.

Information from the Law Centres Network (LCN) suggests that on average, legal aid now accounts for only about 20%

of law centre income. Two-fifths comes from grants and charitable foundations, with the rest from varying proportions of fast-diminishing local authority funding, costs awarded in cases they win, and donations.

For example, the income of South West London Law Centres has fallen from £1.93m in 2009/10 to £1.57m in 2022/23. Even more significantly, notes Marples, its income from legal aid has nearly halved, from £950,373 to £592,977.

The result, he says, has been an ‘unsustainable operation, with annual deficits reducing cash reserves to a precariously low level’. With 78% of its annual budget spent on salaries, ‘the centre’s current financial situation is dire’.

This predicament has also forced the management team to spend a disproportionate amount of time trying to keep the doors open, rather than focusing on developing services, he adds.

The ‘constant merry-go-round’ of applying for grants to fund services, confirms Ealing’s Fewkes, leaves ‘little ability to plan when the funding situation is precarious’.

Grants make up 71% of Merseyside Law Centre’s income, with charitable funders accounting for 23% and 6% coming from legal aid. The reliance on such a high level of charitable funding, says Reed, means that time and resources continuously need to be spent on identifying sources of funding and making applications.

Collectively, law centres account for 3% of all civil legal aid providers. But in their respective areas of practice, their footprint is even larger – they operate 13% of housing, 9.5% of immigration and 35% of discrimination.

Nimrod Ben-Cnaan, LCN’s head of policy and profile, tells the Gazette that last year all law centres across all areas of law were paid less than £9m for completed legal aid work. In the same period, they closed nearly 19,000 legal aid cases, preventing evictions, securing immigration status and fighting discrimination.

The Access to Justice Foundation estimates that specialist legal advice saves the public purse £9,100 per case. Using that estimate, Ben-Cnaan argues that centres have saved the government over £172m.

In addition, even the Ministry of Justice estimates that £1 of public money spent on early legal advice generates public benefits of at least £4.10.

‘There are over 14 million people living in poverty in the UK, including 4.3 million children – the scale of need is immense,’ adds Ben-Cnaan. ‘Just imagine how many more lives we could improve and how much money we could save the public purse if we could apply legal aid earlier, before the stakes and costs escalate, and if legal aid were better paid, allowing law centres to recruit and retain more public service lawyers.

‘Legal aid is the stone that successive governments have left unturned when looking at alleviating poverty.’

Despite claiming that it wants to ‘make work pay, be of service to the public, relieve pressure on NHS and the courts, alleviate poverty and remove obstacles to opportunity’, the Labour government has shown no indication that it will be any different, suggest Ben-Cnaan.

Yet he stresses: ‘Our work is integral to achieving these vital aims. In the context of government spending, it would take relatively little to put it on a sustainable footing, able to drive community recovery and economic growth.’

Direct funding plea

Aside from increased legal aid rates and public funding to pay for early advice, law centres are calling for direct funding from the MoJ to cover core costs, and funding to train the next generation of legal aid solicitors and supervisors.

Ludwig wants to see ‘less bureaucracy and more trust’ in ‘those with legal aid contracts’, moving away from a process that is ‘micro-managed and excessively audited’, to enable lawyers to spend more time helping clients.

Reopening court enquiry counters and direct telephone services, others suggest, would relieve some pressure on law centres.

On the wider policy front, suggestions range from scrapping the benefit cap, restoring the winter fuel allowance and sickness and incapacity benefits, ending the ‘bedroom tax’, providing an amnesty for those in rent arrears due to the bedroom tax and creating a legal mechanism for people to downsize.

Others want to see the abolition of ‘right to buy’, a programme to build more council housing, and the re-establishment of a national social fund.

More fundamentally, Reed calls for a greater promotion of the entitlement to benefits, restoration of the status of the welfare state as ‘safety net’, and an end to the ‘strivers/skivers’ rhetoric.

Citing the model adopted by the Welsh government, Reed urges ministers in England to conduct advice needs assessments and ‘develop a model of funding that can help law centres and other providers become more stable, and able to plan longer-term strategy’.

 

Catherine Baksi is a freelance journalist