Reforms spell end of the road for community law centres

A Community Law Centre in a former pub in Anerley, south east London

One third of community law centres are at risk of closure at the very time that they are most needed. Matt Scott reveals the impact of marketisation on an essential public service

A new report by Goldsmiths College, the University of London and funded by the Leverhulme Trust has revealed that community law centres are experiencing pressures as a result of public service modernisation. As a consequence of increased marketisation of the service there has been:

• underfunding of work with clients
• greater pressures on managers and trustees
• less scope for public legal education
• reduced community outreach
• an undermining of wider preventative and policy work, including taking on test cases.

These pressures are now being exacerbated as a result of the Legal Aid, Sentencing and Punishment of Offenders Act (Laspo). At the very time that Law Centres are most needed, the Law Centres Federation (LCF) have estimated that one third are at risk of closure.

Writing in the Law Society Gazette Julie Bishop, the director of LCF, describes what is under threat:  ‘It comes down to a simple formula: civil legal assistance, based in the community, working for equal justice for all by targeting those most in need. We use our legal skills and expertise to help our clients and communities, tackle deprivation and the many injustices that come with it. That’s it.’

This formula has been put under grave strain since the ‘reforms’ of the previous government, which is the principle focus of the report.  However both the scale of current cuts and the coalition’s own reforms, according to Bishop, spell the end of the road for Legal Aid and law centres as we know them. She writes that the Laspo act ‘proved beyond doubt just how averse the current government is to the principle of access to justice – which it repeatedly refused to include in Laspo’.

In the Goldsmiths College report the principle of ‘access to justice’ drives the research.  In particular how access to justice is made easier or harder according to recent government policy and what it is about government policy that has a decisive influence. Following 112 in-depth interviews of stakeholders and survey of 25 law centres, responded to by over 100 staff and volunteers, the overwhelming conclusion is that recent reforms have made access to justice harder and that the commitment of successive governments to an ideology of the market as the ultimate arbiter of social value has been particularly damaging.  Those affected identified modernisation and the ideology of social markets as more often putting pressure to turn the work of law centres into a commodity, away from preventative work and social justice values.

One of the fundamental requirements of a democratic society – access to justice – is shown by the report to have
broken down

In addition to the findings illustrating how time with clients, public legal education, outreach and preventative work were ‘squeezed’, the overall combination of pressures threaten the very notion of social justice itself, specifically that the poorest and most vulnerable in society no longer have access to justice. Thus one of the fundamental requirements of a democratic society is shown by the report to have broken down. The analysis made in the report illustrates how this evisceration is a product of a certain form of ideology and politics. Access to justice has waxed and waned in proportion to the relative health of the welfare state.

The effect on staff was almost invariably stressful. The dilemma of being able to square professional values with a more ‘business-like’ approach put greater pressure on time, in particular time seeing clients, collaboration across sectors, and with increasing numbers of volunteers and students, a concern to avoid exploiting unpaid labour. These tensions often led to a demoralisation of staff, who frequently continued to put in long hours, amid a lack of job security because the work was a labour of love. One solicitor interviewed noted the dedication that drove people and argued that it seemed as though ‘government (was) trying to squeeze that out of the community’.

On a more hopeful note, there was also evidence of law centres seizing the initiative in a number of ways by insisting on collaborative approaches and developing a local culture whereby complementary approaches amongst partners and co-operation became the norm.

Proposals for ways forward were potentially double-edged however. Charging clients who are mainly subsisting on benefits is unlikely to be viable. Setting up trading arms that could cross-subsidise legal aid work risks fierce and ultimately unsuccessful competition with private firms, and undertaking ‘no win no fee’ work comes with the potential perception of ‘ambulance chasing’.

Perhaps law centres can now reclaim a more radical agenda however. Returning to Julie Bishop’s recent article, she has argued that the situation ‘is liberating; it allows law centres to go on challenging the Laspo settlement and to campaign for again broadening the scope of civil Legal Aid’. This would overturn the assumed consensus of a big society and a small state which prohibit such an investment of sustainable public funding. But if successful it would enable access to justice for those who need it most.

• A copy of the full report including an executive summary can be downloaded here.