Select Committee on Constitutional Affairs Written Evidence


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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