Examination of Witnesses (Questions 180-199)
ALISON HANNAH,
RICHARD JENNER
AND ADAM
GRIFFITH
30 JANUARY 2007
Q180 Julie Morgan: This is a follow-up
question. In parts of rural Wales it is quite hard to get specialist
advice on housing, debt and welfare benefits. What tends to happen
is that a client will go to a CAB which has a contract with the
LSC or to a solicitor who has a contract in one bit of work, but
they are backed up then by the Wales Specialist Support Service
to support them. How do you think that sort of arrangement would
be affected?
Richard Jenner: As you may know,
the Specialist Support Service is currently still under review.
Q181 Chairman: We hoped that we had
saved them!
Richard Jenner: Obviously we support
them. We think precisely one of their values is to provide that
back-up and particularly in areas where provision on the ground
is a bit thin. That is why we want to see it continue. We are
hoping that the Commission will, in the end, take the same view.
Adam Griffith: In Wales, there
is a serious problem with the lack of supply, as we understand
it. The Commission and the Assembly Government have recently published
a Strategy for Wales, as I am sure you know, which actually said
that in their view the majority of social welfare law advice in
Wales should be provided over the telephone. We think that this
raises a number of issues that this committee has highlighted
previously: the danger of drifting into a two-tier system where
some people get advice face-to-face and other people, like people
in Wales, will largely have to rely on a telephone service. There
are changes going on at the moment in relation to CLS Direct,
the telephone service, in the way it has been re-contracted out
and the lack of quality review so far. I think there are serious
concerns about what will happen in certain areas, particularly
rural areas and in Wales.
Q182 Chairman: It has been suggested
to us that one way of proceeding in order to assess the impact
of the reforms, especially the best value competition, might be
to limit it to the criminal legal aid side with the civil legal
aid side not following until the reforms in the criminal area
have been assessed. Do you agree with that? Do you think there
are any dangers in that staged approach? Obviously that begs the
question of whether you want to oppose all the reforms. If the
Government is going to proceed on roughly the lines which it intends,
would it be helpful to wait on the civil side until the criminal
side has been done first?
Alison Hannah: I think it would
be a great deal of help if it was started with crime and the effects
of that were monitored, not least because of course the major
expenditure of the legal aid budget is on crime. If they are looking
to make savings, then it is obvious that the first place to look
would be on the high spending crime sections particularly . I
think most people accept that there is quite a lot of difference
between criminal practice and social welfare law. The social welfare
law costs are relatively quite small compared to both crime and
family. In terms of more bangs for your bucks, it would certainly
make sense to start with crime. It would certainly make sense
to monitor and maybe to pilot some of the criminal changes as
well. To that extent, I think it is a good thing that the fixed
fees that incorporate travel and waiting will be trialled in the
16 urban areas before being rolled out. I think that makes a lot
of sense.
Richard Jenner: It is worth adding
that the contracting regime that emerged in 2000 was very carefully
piloted over a number of years and was independently assessed
and researched. It is a little disappointing that what are probably
more far-reaching changes are not being piloted. I am not sure
whether you could learn from a pilot on crime how that would impact
on social welfare law. I think we would want to make a plea for
more piloting before going ahead with the proposals in general.
Q183 David Howarth: On that piloting
point, there was the rather unfortunately named London Competitive
Criminal Tendering Pilot. I do not know what a competitive criminal
is, but never mind! Was that the kind of thing that should have
been tried, do you think, before going ahead with the best value
regime on a geographically limited basis?
Alison Hannah: I was probably
more involved in the crime project than Advice Services Alliance.
I think there was intended to be a pilot. The price competitive
tendering project was supposed to be a pilot for London. If you
were going to go down the route of competitive tendering, I think
the proposals put forward in the Carter Review made a great deal
more sense than the Legal Services Commission proposals, which
were a pretty crude price Dutch auction really because at the
time it was accepted that there was going to be a very low quality
threshold. At the time, I think they were saying that only 5%
of providers would be eliminated on quality grounds. Then it would
be a straight bid for what proportion of duty solicitors slots
you would take at such and such a price, so it was a real downward
spiral. Having gone to many of the meetings that took place around
that, there were some very daft comments being made about "I
am going to put in a bid of £1 a case because then I know
I will be guaranteed the Crown Court cases". It was a real
illustration of how straight price competitive tendering would
be a complete disaster because the stakes were so high for firms
to make sure that they got the business that they really threw
caution to the wind in some of the comments that were made. I
do think the Carter proposals make a lot more sense because they
were very much intended to have tendering on the basis of price,
quality and volume. It is interesting now that the volume bit
seems to be a little less certain. If you were to buy the economic
package that Lord Carter was putting forward, then that has to
be a worry. If you think the future lies—and I am not saying
that I do—in a small number of bigger firms and you are
not offering any more money, indeed you are offering to drop a
lot of the income for some firms, then you really have to be able
to make those economies of scale to make it practicable. At the
moment, we really do not know whether it is going to be practicable
or not. All the evidence about the provider base of solicitors
is that it is extremely fragile and the research that has been
done all indicates that even with big firms, the margins of profitability
can be pretty low. There is an awful lot of risk involved in the
move towards tendering certainly.
Q184 David Howarth: That does raise
the question of precisely what is going to happen in the second
round. You have one round of competition and then you say that
the supplier base is quite fragile. What happens in the next round?
Are we going to have competition in the next round?
Alison Hannah: I see no crystal
ball here! It is almost impossible to imagine who would be in
for a second round, particularly because of the preferred supplier
scheme, which is going to be one of the key factors. In order
to become a preferred supplier, you have to have a contract; you
have to have your key performance indicators measured in accordance
with the contract; you have to have this new file assessment value
for money to make sure that you have been administrating the legal
aid scheme properly in terms of devolved powers and legal aid
eligibility for clients; you have to have your peer review. If
you get through all those, then you may become a preferred supplier,
but how can that work in a second round? Where would there be
a new entrant that could possibly supply that number of preconditions?
It is very difficult to see how it would work, not least because
peer review is going to be organisation-wide. You could not see
a situation where maybe a department would split because the peer
review would be for the organisation, not for the department.
I think it is really hard. I do not know that this is answered
by Carolyn Regan. I find it really hard to see who would be left
to put in a bid in the second round. Then you have the worry that
prices will actually be driven up by competitive tendering. If
there is only a small number of bidders, then they can form cartels
and why would not the prices go up?
Q185 David Howarth: It is not just
splitting off old firms; you cannot see how a new firm could get
together, organise itself and get the various qualifications to
be in a position to bid. That raises the question: can we have
this sort of bidding system but differently so that there would
be some possibility of competition in a second round and, if so,
what would that look like? How would it be different from the
system we are being offered?
Richard Jenner: Like Alison, I
am very sceptical about this. It is worth saying, particularly
when we are talking about social welfare law, that we are not
convinced that there is a huge market out there. In practice,
in most towns there may be three, four or five suppliers doing
some social welfare law. Very often that work has been divided
up between them on the basis of custom, practice and possibly
by agreement. There may be a firm doing housing cases; the local
CAB will be doing the bulk of the debt and benefit cases; a law
centre may be doing employment; and one or two may be providing
across more than one subject. That does not really look to me
like a market ripe for competition. I do not believe, under the
changes in regulation, that in social welfare law you are going
to have a lot of new types of supplier coming in and wanting to
compete for that kind of work. There is a possibility that in
relation to certain basic benefits claims you might get some new
commercial suppliers showing an interest. I suspect that will
be more at the level of doing telephone advice. I am not convinced
there is a market out there. Certainly, in relation to a second
round, I cannot envisage that if not-for-profit agencies have
been unsuccessful in the first round they will be around for the
second round. Some of them are so reliant on legal aid funding
that they will close if they lose out. My instinct tells me that
some will manage to stagger on, possibly with local authority
funding, but I am not sure you will get large numbers of them
wanting to go through all the effort and procedures that Alison
has talked about to become involved a second time round. Certainly,
as far as our sector is concerned, I think there will be one round.
Q186 David Howarth: You also mentioned
peer review. What are your views about how that might or might
not work? Can a peer review system of the sort envisaged guarantee
quality over the period of the contract. Is this really going
to work?
Richard Jenner: We do not know
for certain. There are issues for example about peer reviewing
organisations rather than individual advisers. We do strongly
support peer review. We do not think it is the only measure of
quality. There are issues like client care and client satisfaction
that have to be taken strongly into account. We do think that
peer review is probably the best available measure of the quality
of legal work. We strongly supported the development of the scheme
by the LSC. I think that is an example where the LSC worked well
with practitioners and representative bodies to get agreement
for what is a robust and independent scheme. We have some concerns
that there are two initiatives here. One is the coming of competition
and the other is the preferred suppliers' initiative. We have
concerns that the timescales for those two schemes will be wrong
and that you will be getting into competitive tendering long before
it is clear exactly who the preferred suppliers are. That is one
difficulty we have with it. It is also worth pointing out that,
as things stand, peer review is at the end of the assessment process
for preferred supplier. People have to jump through very many
other hoops first, many of which are proxies, not direct measures,
not peer review. It is also worth pointing out that organisations
with small contracts may, in the end, only be peer reviewed in
one of their subject areas, so there is no guarantee that everyone
who will eventually become a preferred supplier will have achieved
the peer review. Our concern, therefore, is that you might get
some organisation that you really would not want to contract with
getting through. The real doubt is whether the timetables will
keep in step with each other. We think that, as things stand at
the moment, competitive tendering is very likely to be introduced
before it is clear who the true preferred suppliers really are.
Alison Hannah: I agree with what
Richard has said. May I add two things about peer review? I think
everybody does agree that peer review is a good system for assessing
the quality of advice; it is certainly an improvement on the audit
process. Of course, it has been designed for the present situation.
The question is, as Ed Cape put it: how robust will it be over
time? That must be a question. Leaving aside the question of it
being organisational and therefore you do not really know that
any particular department at any particular time might be up to
the same level over time, will there effectively be grade inflation?
If the peer reviewers, who are themselves working under the same
pressures, are going to think `It is not as good as it was two
years ago but, on the other hand, what do you expect for the fees
that are available?' effectively will you end up with people purportedly
being at the same level but actually not providing as good quality.
That is a bit of a concern as to whether, over time, it is going
to be able to maintain its level.
Richard Jenner: It will not pick
up cherry picking. If suppliers cut corners because of the pressures
of fixed fees, it may pick that up, but if suppliers simply decide
they are not going to take on the complex cases that we were talking
about earlier, there is no reason to think peer reviews will pick
that up. All peer reviews are there for is to say: has this particular
firm handled that claim properly? If it was, it was. As far as
I understand it, it is not in the job description of peer review
to make an assessment of whether suppliers have actually changed
their case mix, so they will not necessarily pick up many of the
issues and concerns that we raised earlier.
Q187 Chairman: It should be.
Richard Jenner: Yes. We would
support that if it was made part of the job of peer review to
look at those issues. In my view they would have the expertise
to do it, yes.
Adam Griffith: It is a complicated
statistical issue. Peer review works on the assumption that if
you take 20 files and peer review 15, there is something like
a 97% probability that it is all right and a good indication of
something. As I understand it, that is the principle of peer review.
If you come back to the same organisation and pick up another
20 or 15 files, will you find in there something that you can
compare to the 20 or 15 files you looked at three years ago and
detect a shift? I think it would be very difficult to do. If there
had been a very major change, if you suddenly found that all the
cases you were looking at were short cases and lasted two hours,
maybe, but if one or two more were on the short side, I do not
think you could draw any conclusions from that. I do not think
as a tool it is designed to do that.
Q188 David Howarth: I have a final
point on peer review. I think it was Professor Cape who put to
us the point that one difficulty with applying peer review to
all aspects of the system is that it is a file-based way of making
an assessment, but some of what we are talking about, like oral
advice in a police station, will not appear on the files. How
do you assess the quality of that in a way that does not either
involve excessive cost or somehow interferes with the system of
giving advice itself in the first place?
Alison Hannah: I think there has
been talk of trying to assess advocacy quality. You had quite
a session on that. That is one issue. Quality is more than simply
quality assuring. Peer review is a method of quality assurance
but it does not necessarily of itself provide quality. You can
learn from it, obviously, but if you are going to have a good
quality professional advice giver, then it is only one factor.
Obviously experience, training, morale, supervision, good quality
information and educational resources all come into it. The research
in America suggests that one of the main factors in deciding quality
is to maintain what would be called an appropriate level of case-load.
If you are overburdened with too many cases, then the quality
of the work is going to drop. Peer review only, as you say, looks
at what is in the file. There are many other issues around quality
that peer review is not designed to address at all.
Richard Jenner: That was one of
the concerns we had about Lord Carter's recommendation, that panels
might not be needed any more because of peer review. I think that
probably is not true, for the reason that Alison has just given.
Q189 Julie Morgan: On remuneration
schemes, the not-for-profit providers have strongly criticised
the proposals to merge the remuneration schemes for civil legal
aid solicitors and not-for-profit providers. Is there any justification
for retaining the difference in pay schemes between not-for-profit
suppliers and specialist legal aid solicitors advising on the
same issues?
Richard Jenner: No, not in my
view. It is worth saying that some of our members have certainly
criticised that. There are mixed views about the principle of
having a unified contract. Our position is that it is difficult
to argue as a matter of principle that people should be being
paid on an entirely different basis for doing the same work. We
would not want to start by saying that advice agencies should
be paid fundamentally differently. The issue is what the terms
are on which the payments are being made. We are concerned, and
we are still in negotiation over the details of the contract,
that there is proper sharing of risks and that the terms are fair
on both parties. We still have some way to go in those discussions.
One point I would want to flag up, and I think this is probably
one of the biggest concerns raised by our members, is the move
from paying in advance at the moment to a situation where you
would be paid in arrears. Two things need to be said about that.
Firstly, the transitional arrangements for that will need to be
very carefully handled because in practice there is a real risk
that that will create huge cash flow problems for agencies suddenly
moving from one system to another. Certainly our members are very
anxious about that. Secondly, that approach to payment certainly
does not appear, in our view, to comply with the compact that
has been agreed between the Government and the voluntary sector,
which does say that in normal circumstances voluntary sector organisations
should be paid in advance for work being done. We are not entirely
clear why the Commission feels that payment under legal aid contract
should be done differently from what is suggested by the compact.
That is an issue about which we are also still in discussions
with them.
Q190 Julie Morgan: Do you think there
is a real danger that voluntary sector providers could go out
of business?
Richard Jenner: Yes, without a
shadow of doubt, particularly if the transitional arrangements
from one system to another are not sufficiently worked out.
Q191 Chairman: There could be cash-flow
problems?
Richard Jenner: Yes. They will
just simply find that they have not got the money.
Adam Griffith: The way it is proposed
to work is that it will at least start off essentially with payments
in advance, and then there would be a reconciliation process.
The danger that we see is that agencies that are unable, for whatever
reason, to finish cases and record them close enough to the fixed
fee levels to reflect their costs may find, over time, that the
amount essentially that they owe the Commission is not going down,
or indeed is even going up. At that point, they will be in a terrible
position if they cannot see the light at the end of the tunnel.
They will be under considerable pressure just to cut their losses
and get out. That is a real danger. It is a combination of two
things. It is partly just moving on to fixed fees altogether,
which is a big shift. Obviously for some agencies it will be all
right but for many agencies that requires them to turn over cases
more quickly than they have done before. It is going to be quite
a problem.
Alison Hannah: I am not sure whether
this is quite on the same point but on the question of the fixed
fees in general, there are two issues about the level of the fixed
fee and also the flexibility of the fixed fee. Following on from
what Adam has said, the problem with the system as presented is
that the argument is swings and roundabouts. If you only have
swings, then you cannot make it up on the roundabouts. There are
going to be different organisations that specialise in different
things. On the whole, for example, law centres specialise in the
complex cases where there are not necessarily legal aid certificates
and there may be clients who are in particular a high majority
of black and ethnic minorities or disabilities and those tend
to be the more expensive cases. Although the Legal Services Commission
says that they need to manage their case mix, they really are
not suggesting that the complex cases and the clients with complex
language or other needs should not fall within the system. Of
course, there is the perverse incentive in the system that is
being proposed that people will want to make sure that their fees
come within the level of fixed fees and the clients are again
going have to squash into the fees rather than the fees fit around
the clients. That is a pretty fundamental change. It is going
to be quite hard to prevent some element of that happening because
if you know that you will go out of business because you have
too many complex cases, what are you supposed to do? If your mission
is to help those people, it is pretty difficult to say, "I
am sorry. Here is the phone number for CLS Direct or try so and
so down the road". It could be pass the parcel with the most
vulnerable people not getting the service and the service ironically
helping those with either the less complex problems or the greater
ability to present their needs in a nice simple clear way that
makes it easy for the adviser. That is the last thing that anybody,
including the LSC, wants, but there is going to be that incentive.
Adam Griffith: May I add one point
on that? There is a particular concern. Where the advice sector
and the local solicitors are well organised and there have been
quite clear demarcation lines as to who does what and it is agreed
that the more complicated cases of a certain kind go to certain
agencies and so on, in many places you actually have a system
which was what the Community Legal Service was supposed to be
about, where there is agreement on the ground as to who would
do what. One of the many dangerous side-effects of introducing
fixed fees is that it breaks that up because the people who are
doing the more complicated cases will have to come down and take
some of the easy cases from the people who otherwise would have
done them. Those in fact include many cases that are done by agencies
in work that is not funded by the Commission. It goes back to
the earlier question about the numbers. One thing that will happen
is that agencies will be going out and making legal aid cases
out of things that could have been dealt with outside the legal
aid scheme before and, at the same time, will be disrupting the
relationships that have been built up on the ground between the
different agencies as to who will do what. It will purely be so
that those agencies that are working under an LSC-funded fixed
fee system are able to survive. We think that that would be very
sad.
Q192 Julie Morgan: Do you think a
system of fixed or graduated fees could be made to work for the
not-for-profit sector?
Richard Jenner: We suggested some
alternatives. Notably, we suggested in relation to social welfare
law that there should be more categories of different types of
fees to take account of different types of work. If you look at
employment, we would be proposing three categories: one for unfair
dismissal cases; one for discrimination cases; and one for the
rest. The suggestion would be that the rest would be slightly
lower than was currently proposed in order that the more complex
areas of work be paid by a higher fee. That was rejected. The
other suggestion we made is that there could be some kind of graduated
fee in social welfare law cases to take account of the level of
work undertaken on behalf of the client. We accept there are some
potential difficulties in that. Certainly our view is that a scheme
would be better if it had more flexibility along those kinds of
lines.
Alison Hannah: The other complement
is the cases, but also the clients can make the cases particularly
longer and boost the costs. Although the Legal Services Commission
is very unwilling to go down that route, the research does show
that black and minority ethnic clients do tend to take longer
and therefore are more expensive, as are clients with disabilities.
If you were able to have an add-on for particular clients, in
some ways I think that would also help towards the cherry picking,
to prevent cherry picking. It would make more financial sense
for organisations to take on these complex or lengthy cases because
they would be paid a bit more and they would not have to worry
about: are we going to make it into an exceptional, three times
the expense case or are we just going to lose money on it by going
over the fixed fee and hoping possibly that we might make it up
at some other point. I think it would help with that.
Chairman: We have covered cherry picking
quite a bit. I am conscious of the time restraint. I am going
to ask Bob Neill to come in with a couple of other points that
I do not want us to miss.
Q193 Bob Neill: I was talking to
a lady yesterday who has a problem with child custody issues.
She also has divorce issues, which stem from the same thing. She
also has some housing problems. It is what we call a problem cluster.
At the moment, the solicitor can do some of those other things
under the tolerance work, but it seems as if the proposals we
have from the Department and the LSC are positively designed to
make it unattractive for solicitors to do tolerance work and in
fact to phase it out when you get the preferred suppliers. Is
that going to make my constituent's situation worse? Is it going
to be an even greater deterrent or is there some way that it will
all come out all right and she will get a service without having
to go round half of Bromley?
Richard Jenner: I am not sure
that problem can really be satisfactorily resolved within the
existing resources for the scheme, to be honest. That problem,
to be properly resolved, would need expanded provision in many
areas. The issue around tolerance has always been a difficult
one because it is a balance between an access and a quality issue.
It can be argued that allowing solicitors to do work under tolerance
provides access which would not be available otherwise because
it is very specialist. There is a problem with that argument,
though, which is that nearly all the research that has ever been
done into this issue suggests that there are real quality concerns
when people start providing services outside their areas of expertise.
I think that in the longer term it is probably not unreasonable
to say that we should be moving away from tolerance towards actually
filling the gaps with proper specialist supply. The difficulty
at the moment is that it is not clear that that can happen under
the new arrangements. I do not know if you intend to ask us about
CLACs and CLANs. We have a number of issues about CLACs and CLANs
but we are supportive of the aim of CLACs and CLANs, which is
to try to ensure that there is a more holistic service, if you
like to improve upon the kind of arrangements that Adam was talking
about earlier and get practitioners with different types of expertise
working together, better referrals and more joined-up services.
That is something we think that the Commission is right in saying
it wants to achieve as opposed to just carrying on with the current
way of dealing with the number of tolerances.
Q194 Bob Neill: I understand your
point about the quality control approach. We may come back to
that. It has been suggested sometimes that this stops the development
of silos and that if firms are doing tolerance work, that may
be the first route into building up some expertise.
Richard Jenner: Yes, I think we
would accept that. There is an argument that has not really been
resolved. What you have to be careful about is forcing individual
solicitor or advisers down the road where it is impossible for
them to develop skills in new areas of law. I think that is a
genuine issue that has not really been resolved under the current
scheme.
Q195 Bob Neill: There is a balance
between that and maintaining quality control?
Richard Jenner: Yes, there is.
At the moment, the research does appear to be very clear. There
is not an issue about whether we are talking about a level two
or a level three. There is a real issue about some providers doing
tolerance work that is of quite poor quality because they simply
do not have the expertise to do that.
Q196 Bob Neill: I get the impression
that is a view that is generally shared.
Alison Hannah: I think that is
right. The research does show that. The only problem, of course,
is that some firms may not be able to get the volume to get a
contract. They may not want it obviously either. In some areas,
particularly rural areas, they may be better than nothing. It
is obviously better to have somebody giving you some help perhaps
than none.
Q197 Chairman: It is not much help
to be told in an area like mine by the local solicitor, "I
could do this work but you probably ought to go to a solicitor
65 miles away who might be able to help you". It is not realistic.
Alison Hannah: No, that is right.
Q198 Bob Neill: You mentioned CLACs
and CLANs. Perhaps we could come on to that because I am interested
in how you see that developing. One thing that strikes me is that
actually what we are doing is potentially creating monopolies
here.
Richard Jenner: Yes. One thing
that puzzles ASA is that it is not clear really how the CLAC model
as opposed to the CLAN model really fits into the market-based
approach advocated by Lord Carter and now the Government. It is
also not clear to us exactly how it fits in to the current Government's
emphasis on increasing choice in the provision of public services.
It is absolutely clear that if you set up a CLAC, you are creating
monopoly provision, at least in social welfare law. My understanding
is that the Commission accepts that in the family services you
have to have at least one or two other providers in the area;
otherwise you get the obvious problem of conflict of interest,
although it is worth saying that that can arise in relation to
areas of social welfare law as well. Leaving aside that puzzlement,
if you like, our view is that it is quite risky. It is a very
risky strategy for the Commission to put all its eggs in one basket.
It really comes back to the points that you were raising earlier
about second rounds of competition. If anything, the problem is
going to be even more acute in relation to CLACs because any not-for-profit
sector providers that do not win the contract to run the CLAC
or at least be a subcontractor for part of it will, almost certainly,
go out of business. In the case of CLACs, you are not only losing
your legal aid money, but you will be losing your local authority
funding. Therefore, if a CLAC fails, there will not be any not-for-profit
sector providers available in the area to build up. I suspect
that by the time legal aid firms have lost their contract in the
current difficult climate, given the low level of morale that
you see with a lot of private practitioners, they will not be
interested in coming back after it has failed and saying, "Oh,
well, we will pick up the pieces". It does seem to me a very
risky strategy. Our view is that we would like to see piloting
and testing of models of provision that we would describe as more
akin to community legal service networks, possibly consortia,
possibly federations of different providers, and working with
the Commission on probably a less top-down approach than has been
taken so far in relation to CLACs actually to work out on the
ground how practitioners can work together to provide, as we talked
about, a more joined-up service. We are interested in seeing that.
It has to be tested. It will not be providing an identical model
in every town. It seems to me that that is a more sensible approach
than trying to set up monopoly supply.
Alison Hannah: I agree with everything
that Richard has said on that. Certainly anecdotally you get the
feeling that there is a lot more interest in setting up networks
and that people are looking for ways to try to get those implemented
in an informal way as really a way of testing out how they might
work. People are much more sympathetic to that than the one-size-fits-all
CLAC.
Q199 Bob Neill: The other point that
struck me when looking at this aspect of it is that whatever the
situation, whether a private firm or a not-for-profit provider,
be it CLACs or CLANs or whatever, you have a three-year contract
and you can get three-months notice of termination. What are the
implications of that?
Richard Jenner: My understanding
from Adam is that that is not the situation now.
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