News focus: Early advice pilot was a missed opportunity

Nearly four years after the government committed to piloting early advice in social welfare law, a six-month scheme finally began last October. The chief executive of the Legal Aid Practitioners Group described the pilot as a lost opportunity to demonstrate the positive impact of legal aid. The results of the exercise suggest Chris Minnoch was right.

In a written parliamentary response last week, justice minister Mike Freer revealed that 27,000 invitations were sent to residents of Middlesbrough and Manchester identified as having ‘early stage’ housing-related debt. Only 104 people applied to participate. Three Middlesbrough residents requested and attended a free advice session. No one in Manchester participated.

Freer said a pilot evaluation ‘has gathered valuable insights on the nature and implementation of such pilots as well as the barriers to engagement’.

However, practitioners warned the government of flaws in the way the scheme was run. Manchester City Council and Middlesbrough Council both sent information on the scheme to people with council tax arrears. In Manchester, the information accompanied first reminder letters. Middlesbrough wrote to people with a council tax arrears liability order.

‘They were contacted by letter and asked to respond to the pilot administrator, rather than direct to the pilot service providers,’ said Law Society president Lubna Shuja. ‘A consequence of this approach was that very few responded to the letter and the number of people choosing to access the advice was negligible.’

Central England Law Centre said: ‘Our experience is clients don’t respond to letters from the council. They can be suspicious or worried when receiving a letter particularly. Many are in arrears with council tax so will ignore the letter or be suspicious that advice is not independent.’

The pilot was amended so participants could also be considered through direct referrals from legal aid providers participating in the scheme, and other local legal aid and service providers. Shuja said the changes came too late in the process and had little impact.

'They insisted they had to create something new, including a new referral mechanism, but then imposed arbitrary and unnecessary restrictions on the service'

Chris Minnoch, Legal Aid Practitioners Group

‘If this pilot had been available in our area, it certainly would not have been an attractive option for us as a not-for-profit law centre because of the amount of administration involved,’ Central England Law Centre said. Firms with housing and debt contracts are likely to have experienced and knowledgeable housing lawyers, but unlikely to have experienced or knowledgeable debt and welfare benefit lawyers, the law centre added.

Clients had to jump through too many hoops, LAPG’s Minnoch said.

‘We repeatedly advised them to take services currently assisting the target beneficiaries, enhance or modify them to give them the tools the MoJ wanted to test, and then monitor client take-up and outcomes. They insisted they had to create something new, including a new referral mechanism, but then imposed arbitrary and unnecessary restrictions on the service, such as the three-hour limit on advice, and used existing (very low) fees. Their justification for this was that they wanted to test the service in real world conditions, ironically.’

If the MoJ were to redo the pilot, what should it do differently? Minnoch proposes:

• Take an existing set of providers currently assisting the target client group (for instance, clients in rent arrears facing possession proceedings) and do not impose any additional processes that clients have to go through other than consents needed to undertake research;
• Allow providers to give advice on linked issues – primarily welfare benefits and debt;
• Ensure providers have advisers with the requisite skill sets and experience across all specialisms (recruit if necessary);
• Allow providers to spend as much time as they need to resolve the problems, and claim on hourly rates so the time it takes to reach resolution can be monitored accurately;
• If the MoJ still wishes to test the impact of fixed fees, have a sub-set of providers working under fixed fees and compare the results with providers not working within fee limits;
• Providers in the pilot group will have limited capacity so will be turning clients away - track what happens to these clients to compare outcomes with clients in the pilot group; and
• Choose providers from a wide range of geographic locations – large metropolitan, smaller urban and rural – and map what other provision exists in each area (for inward and outward referrals, and so you can more accurately track clients outside the pilot group).

A spokesperson for the ministry said: ‘Protecting vulnerable people is a priority for this government. This pilot was primarily used to help us identify potential issues with the scheme before considering wider rollout – and we will publish our evaluation in due course.’

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