Evidence submitted by the Community Law
Partnership
We are a Legal Aid firm in Birmingham specialising
in housing, Asylum support, welfare rights and community care.
We have a specialist team that advises Travellers throughout England
and Wales. We enclose here some submissions concerning the Legal
Aid Inquiry. These are mainly based on our experience in carrying
out our casework and are not meant to be exhaustive, of course.
As examples of cases dealt with we would give
the following:
1. A case from Stratford-upon-Avon where
the clients have tried over 30 other organisations for advice
throughout Warwickshire and the West Midlands before we agreed
to take on their case.
2. A case from Tewkesbury which we had to
take on since there are no other specialist housing suppliers
(we believe) between Gloucester (the Shelter office) and Birmingham.
3. The Northampton MP refers all housing
cases to us due to the lack of any supplier in Northampton.
We believe that getting new lawyers into Legal
Aid has got to be a priority. The LSC grants scheme is welcome
but needs to be more extensive. Perhaps the scheme should even
result in firms being paid to train people in social welfare law,
not just covering part of the salary costs as at present. We quite
simply are not seeing newly qualified lawyers going into this
kind of work in Birmingham. When we send out an advert for a vacancy
we only get a handful of applications. We have to say that most
of those applications are not able to fulfil the conditions for
the job.
With so little increase in Legal Aid rates over
the past 10 years and with an enormous increase in the bureaucracy
required to run Legal Aid work successfully, it is now only the
very committed who remain in the Legal Aid field. Obviously it
is good to have really committed people doing this work but so
few are now doing it that some measures may need to be considered
especially increasing remuneration rates to try and encourage
the remaining firms to keep on with it and even entice a few back
to it.
The Travellers' Advice Team within CLP advises
and represents Travellers throughout England and Wales. The team
is therefore in a very good position to see some of the problems
with Legal Aid throughout England and Wales.
Firstly we are certainly aware of advice deserts.
We run a telephone helpline for Travellers funded by the LSC.
This is a very successful service. However we obviously have to
signpost out some of the callers who are calling about areas of
law that either we do not deal with or cannot deal with in their
area. A good example is Kent. There are absolutely no franchised
housing law providers in Kent. People needing housing advice will
have to either go to Sussex or more probably go to London. This
is quite clearly a ridiculous situation.
Additionally the Travellers' Advice Team very
frequently lodges County Court homeless appeal under the Housing
Act 1996 in County Courts around England and Wales. We frequently
meet with County Courts who have either never met with such an
appeal before or only very rarely meet with such appeals. Often
the court will contact us to ask for advice about this kind of
appeal. In Birmingham, where there are at least some housing providers,
homeless appeals under Section 204 of the 1996 Act are not uncommon
and the County Court are well aware of them. Given the lack of
homeless appeals around the country, we believe that must result
from a total lack of housing advice. We do not believe that every
homelessness decision made by every Local Authority in these areas
is correct and unchallengeable. There must be some decisions that
could be challenged but the lack of housing providers means that
no challenges are brought. The other point this raises is the
question of assessing the need. If nobody is identifying the fact
that bad decisions are being made or advice is required, then
it is extremely difficult for the Community Legal Service to assess
the need for different types of legal advice.
We have a specialist team dealing with Asylum
support cases. To run a successful Asylum support case, it is
also essential that the immigration lawyers (we do not deal in
immigration law) do a proper job. Due to the new Government proposals
for Legal Aid in immigration cases, good lawyers are leaving this
work. As a result, a number of our clients are getting bad results
in terms of their immigration appeals which can completely destroy
all the hard work done by our Asylum support team.
In conclusion we would point out that, for a
long period of time now, Legal Aid firms in Birmingham have had
to turn away clients in droves since none of us can cope with
the volume of need. Urgent steps need to be taken to address all
these problems.
Chris Johnson
On behalf of The Community Law Partnership
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