Advice on family law is to become a permanent feature of the Community Legal Advice service as part of an expansion of the helpline’s remit and service hours.

The Legal Services Commission this week launched a tender for law firms or not-for-profit organisations to provide the service.

Community Legal Advice, which advises on debt, housing, employment, education and welfare benefits, piloted a family law service on its 0845 345 4345 number last year. It received 3,000 calls a month from people wanting family advice, and an evaluation showed 82% of callers were able to resolve their problems. The evaluation found that the pilot reached a diverse base of clients, with 11% of callers describing themselves as disabled and 20% from black or minority ethnic backgrounds.

The LSC said the scheme’s success demonstrates strong demand. It announced a £7m investment over the next three years to fund the new service and extended opening hours – from July the service will take calls on weekday evenings and Saturday mornings.

Family law practitioners attributed the high demand in part to the long wait for appointments at the declining number of solicitors doing family legal aid work.

Resolution’s chief executive Karen Mackay said: ‘If the service acts as an effective triage, filtering out those who only require telephone advice, and referring those who need face-to-face service appropriately, it will be a helpful adjunct that will increase access to justice for those unable to find a solicitor.

‘It has the potential to take the burden off over-stretched practitioners who are becoming an increasingly scarce resource.’

But Christina Blacklaws, Law Society Council member for child law, questioned the LCS’s promise that telephone advice would be given by solicitors rather than paralegals. She said that the tender document stipulates only that the advice be supervised by solicitors. Telephone advice is also an ‘inherently less effective way of communicating’, she said, because of the difficulty of being sure that a client understands advice.