Evidence submitted by the Legal Aid Practitioners
Group (LAPG)
1. This is a briefing note for the Constitutional
Affairs Select Committee highlighting a number of areas of current
concern to the Legal Aid Practitioners Group.
2. LAPG is an independent membership organisation
representing firms working in the legal aid scheme on both the
civil and criminal sides. We have around 600 member firms. We
have developed a "policy of positive engagement" with
the Legal Services Commission, and have been contributing to the
work of Lord Carter's review of procurement of publicly funded
legal services.
3. In this briefing note, we concentrate
on the axing of the Specialist Support Service (SSS). There are
other concerns we have at present which, if the Committee has
time, may be worth their while looking into. These are set out
in summary form in Annex B to this note. If the Committee does
decide to look into any of them, we will gladly provide a more
detailed briefing.
4. The SSS has been, in our view, one of
the successes of the LSC's first five years. It is a key service
which enables people living in rural areas or in advice deserts
to get expert advice on the issues they face, without being expected
to travel unmanageable distances to access the help they need.
5. We also believe that the scheme is essential
in the context of the Community Legal Service Strategy on which
the Commission consulted last year. The Strategy was published
in July 2005, and proposes a reduction in face to face services
in favour of telephone services. We noticed at the time that no
reference was made to the SSS, and said, "We believe that
telephone services have been a real success story of the past
five years, and support their expansion. We note with disappointment
that this section does not refer to the specialist support service,
which we consider to have been a particularly valuable way of
delivering expert services to clients who would have been unable
to access them due to geographical access difficulties, disability
or a reluctance to visit a solicitor's office. We hope that it
is intended that these services should be expanded as well."
6. This could suggest that the decision
to remove the SSS may actually predate the outcome of the Top
Slice Review by some months; or at the very least that its abolition
was under active consideration at the time the CLS Strategy was
being devised, despite the possibility not being raised and justified
in the strategy.
7. A number of our members have contacted
us since the decision was announced. Copies of what they have
said are included in Annex A to this note.
8. The LSC argues that by axing the SSS,
they can help almost 9,000 more people with face to face advice.
This claim does not hold water.
9. First, many of the organisations using
the SSS rely on it to continue in existence at all. The loss of
this service will therefore, as a consequence, reduce the number
of front-line advisers able to offer help to the public. We are
also aware of organisations that were proposing to expand their
services by initially relying on the SSS while they built up their
expertise and their caseload. This way of developing new services
will fall with the SSS. One of these organisations has contributed
comments quoted below.
10. Moreover, at the moment the LSC has
issued contracts allowing solicitors to start over 635,000 new
cases over the year 2005-06. Solicitors are actually on target
to start only 517,000, a slight increase on last year, but a significant
drop on the 582,000 cases started in 2003-04, and the 690,000+
the previous year. Allocating the savings from the SSS to new
case starts will do nothing to increase the number of clients
actually helped.
11. The announcement about the SSS came
at the same time as publication of the latest Annual Report on
the Public Defender Service. This Report shows that the service
has cost £14 million over four years, with running costs
of £4 million last year, to provide work that has been assessed
by independent peer reviewers as no better than "competence
plus" (the highest rating being "excellence") at
a cost significantly greater than the cost of private practitioners
undertaking the same work. The SSS has delivered clear, measurable
and substantial benefits, it had an obvious role in the future
of the Community Legal Service, and it delivered very good value
for money. The PDS has delivered questionable benefits and questionable
value for money, and there is no clear rationale for retaining
it rather than reverting to delivering the same volume of casework
more cheaply through private practice lawyers. In our view, if
it is a question of saving money, the PDS should have been a far
higher priority for the axe than the SSS.
12. We therefore consider the abolition
of the SSS to be counterproductive and highly damaging both to
clients and to the future development of the system. But we see
this as part of a wider picture within the Commission. The LSC
has "more pilots than British Airways", according to
its Director of Children and Family Services, (quoted in the January
2006 issue of Independent Lawyer). Money is repeatedly diverted
from mainstream services to test out new ways of doing things.
Some projects, such as a proposal to run a salaried immigration
service from the Birmingham Public Defender Office never get off
the ground due to practical difficulties. Some, like night courts,
are imposed on the LSC and prove as unsuccessful as their critics
predict. Some of them, even when proved a success, are then cut
for lack of money. We believe that a lot of money is wasted on
unsuccessful pilots or on successful pilots that then do not proceed
anyway due to lack of money to implement them fully.
13. The SSS is not the first victim of this
approach. Last summer, funding for a project to develop a system
for delivering advice over the internet, which had been running
for many months, was abandoned just after an article in the LSC's
Focus magazine praising its results to date.
14. The benefits to be offered to firms
in the preferred supplier project were very limited due to a lack
of resources; despite this, the pilot was evaluated as a complete
success, and was very popular with most of the firms involved.
Yet implementation of the scheme has been on hold for over a year
since the pilot concluded.
15. This sudden about turn has a significant
impact on firms as businesses. The firms delivering the specialist
support have invested to be able to do so on the understanding
that the pilot had been evaluated as a success and the service
had a long-term future. Other firms had developed business plans
that relied on the existence of the service. Their plans are now
in turmoil. Sadly this is not an isolated example. The LSC's priorities
change on a regular basis, to the detriment of good business planning.
16. The most far-reaching example of this
is the way that for the last 10 years, firms have been encouraged
to specialise. The use of "tolerances", enabling firms
to provide services outside their main areas of specialisation,
has been discouraged and disallowed. When the latest round of
social welfare law contracts was awarded in April 2004, the LSC
chose a mechanism for awarding contracts by which it stopped some
firms from continuing to provide services they wanted to provide,
with the result that they have lost the skills in these fields
either by making the relevant staff redundant or by allowing their
knowledge of the law to lapse. And one should not underestimate
the impact of the uneconomic remuneration rates in causing many
firms to drop all but their major areas of work over the past
five years. Now the Commission has decided that it wants firms
to deliver a holistic service like they used to do after all.
Yet in abolishing the SSS, they are axing the key service that
would enable firms to make that transition back to the broader
service for clients.
17. We have recently urged the LSC to do
less but do it better. With the CLS Strategy, CDS Direct, the
Family Help pilot and the Carter review, we fear that the reverse
is happening, and we fear additional waste as the Government pilots
or implements more new ideas that will not work in practice.
18. We do have a certain amount of sympathy
for the LSC. They have been put in a position where every decision
they could take will be wrong, because of the failure of Government
to fund the additional burdens on the legal aid system. These
burdens have been caused by, among other things, the various factors
identified by Ed Cape and Richard Moorhead in their research report
"Demand induced supply", changes in complaints procedures
for police and medical cases, and new procedures by local authorities
before initiating care proceedings. The problems have not primarily
been caused by the LSC, who have been set an impossible task.
They cannot be solved by the LSC.
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