Well I keep meaning to update this, but life got in the way, and the letters m, ' and @ don't work on my laptop anymore. Happily I have dug out an old keyboard and the laptop now resembles something from Back to the Future.
My main gripe/rant is still legal aid, and the cuts thereof, so stop reading now if you don't care.
I've been going through (yet again) the Green Paper on this, and what I keep coming back to is the disproportionate effect on women, those with disabilities, the mentally ill and those of ethnic minorities. When I was in private practice, the people who needed face to face advice were:
- those who didnt have access to a phone - whether they didn't have one, the violent partner wouldn't let them access one, or their English wasn't good enough.
- those with mental illnesses who needed the reassurance of a real person in front of them
- people with literally carrier bags of correspondence from debt companies/other solicitors about eg contact with their kids and who want and need to hand it over to someone to deal with
-people who have drug or alcohol misuse issues who need to come in first thing in the morning when they can take in advice.
-people who couldn't read the letters we sent out to them - we regularly sent out blank letterheads to clients who couldn't read and had no phone. They recognised the logo, and came in to see what we needed!
In my northern rural market town practice, we essentially offered a legal version of a GP - we covered most things, and deferred to specialists if need be. We and the other practices considered ourselves part of the community, and we served that community as best we could. My own practice regularly gave free advice because we believed that everyone should have access, regardless of ability to pay, and the senior partner passionately believed in social justice. He even has 'Justitia omnibus' on his gravestone.
Increasingly, because of the constraints put upon us mainly from Legal Aid, we had to drop services like debt and welfare advice and hope the CABs would take up the slack. By the time I gave up and gave the practice away (yeah - note 'gave' not sold - by then no-one in their right minds would BUY a practice with legal aid contracts!) we had become little more than yet another anonymous company obsessed with targets and policies.
That was a lament for the rose tinted past, sorry. My point was supposed to be that we served the community. This government is suggesting that anyone in future wanting legal aid, should phone ONE SINGLE NATIONAL number, and be told where they can go for advice, IF they are allowed to go at all. If it is deemed that their problem can be solved in a phone call, well they won't get to actually see anyone. It will all be dealt with facelessly. What happened to the Big Society? What happened to looking after people who need help? Do we honestly think we can discharge our social responsibility by giving people who have no phones a call centre number?? Human contact is sorely underestimated, and personally I find it difficult to tell over the phone if a client has genuinely taken in what I have told them - I need to read their expression, and I'm sure clients must feel the same.
All that leads to my second rant - work! Having been my own boss for so long, and been able to voice my opinion freely, it's very hard being subject to restrictions by my boss on what I can comment on. The short answer is I'm not allowed to comment publicly on the cuts, what they mean for clients or any potential redundancies within the firm.
To be frank, this boils my piss.
The company relies on legal aid, the Financial Inclusion Fund and other local funding, all of which have either just been cut, or are about to. Not even being 'allowed' to post links to newspaper articles on the cuts on Facebook makes me feel like a truculent teenager.
I have had offers from various national papers and professional journals to give my opinion on the cuts, and the effect this will have on clients and the workforce, and I can't comment. Given the national apathy on the cuts to legal aid, ANY raising of the profile is good. The only thing I have been able to do is part of the company response to the Green Paper. As long as I didn't denounce telephone advice, and eschewed the traditional methods of delivery i.e. a PR exercise. It reads like a press release.
Unless the company has a frigging millionaire behind the scenes, the likelihood is that it will not survive. I am not party to any discussions that management has, but quite frankly not many services like ours will survive without that much wished for motherfucking fairy. And the loss to clients will be catastrophic.
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