Mainstream political and public debate over recent years has focused very little on the woeful decline of investment in our legal infrastructure, whether in the courts or in the free legal advice services which enable those of modest means to access justice. The ghastly recent series of events including the Sarah Everard case have finally…
My last two blogs have focused respectively on legal advice deserts, and particular difficulties encountered by ethnic minority communities using legal services. It is easier to diagnose these problems than it is to find solutions, let alone the means to implement them. Without reversing some of the cuts in funding for legal aid and free…
Read more - Can unbundling help to improve access to justice?
This guest post from Sarah Chambers, chair of the Legal Services Consumer Panel has been first published on Legal Futures. Chambers: Time for regulators and representative bodies to pull their fingers out At a time when the world has seen a Black female lawyer become vice-president of the USA, it is tempting for the optimists…
As we grind slowly and tier-fully towards the end of a ghastly year, it is sobering to think about the plight of those living in precarious situations and desperately in need of good advice about how to deal with their housing problems. More than half of all local authority areas in England and Wales, covering…
Read more - No Room at the Inn? (and nobody to give free housing advice either!)
I joined the Legal Services Consumer Panel in April 2019 and immediately began to contribute to a Lawtech paper which was subsequently published in May 2019. That paper encouraged legal services regulators to be more proactive on Lawtech. The report emphasised the importance of responsive regulation, incentivising providers to innovate, and adequately protecting consumers. We couldn’t…
Read more - Responsible technological innovation that improves access to justice
Marlene Winfield OBE has spent her career giving a voice to users of public services, including for the last six years as a member of the Legal Services Consumer Panel, where she has made a huge contribution through her expertise in consumer engagement, understanding of what has worked (or not worked) in other sectors –…
Every single person reading this blog post has been touched in one way or the other by the Coronavirus. Its disruption will continue to be felt long after we have beaten it. Right now, we must first focus on taking care of ourselves and each other by staying indoors whenever possible. And second, we must…
Christmas Past: Over the past year we faced the spectre of significant reduction in the protection available to those using the services of solicitors, with the proposed SRA reforms to their rules on PII. We were also experiencing some frustration with the slow pace at which the CMA reforms on transparency were being taken forward….
Read more - A Christmas Carol for Legal Service Users (with apologies to Mr Dickens)
That’s the key message that I’m taking away from the damning verdict on the Mid Staffordshire Hospital Trust by the Francis Report published on Wednesday. And inevitably I’m questioning could the same ever be said of legal services? In many ways we knew so much of what the Francis report was going to say. We knew about…
Read more - All the regulatory rules were in place but this wasn’t enough
Those who follow the legal press will be familiar with recent stories of legal aid reducing, ‘advice deserts’ growing, and specialist lawyers becoming thin on the ground. The Ministry of Justice (MoJ) figures illustrate the problem within just one area. In 2012/13, 82,554 social security cases had legal aid help, compared to just 443 in 2017/18….
Read more - Disappearing Lawyers – Are Advice Deserts stoppable?
Last week, the Legal Services Board (LSB) published its regulatory performance report. It is an insightful and comprehensive read. More than that, it signals a necessary change of tone and focus in an area that is crucial to LSB’s existence: providing oversight to ensure regulation delivers good consumer outcomes. It does, however, raise questions for me…
Read more - Regulatory Performance– room for improvement for all.
Since 2011, the Legal Services Consumer Panel has published an Annual Tracker survey[i] about how consumers are choosing and using legal services. This important research has helped drive the transparency agenda championed by the CMA[ii]. Taking a deeper dive into the Panel’s research produces some perhaps unsurprising findings. For example, it finds that the most-used legal…
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