The term 'legal services' covers the many ways in which anyone coming into contact with the law or the legal system may obtain information about their rights, responsibilities and duties. Legal advice must be efficient, reliable and easy to obtain. We want to make sure that people understand their rights and responsibilities. Only then can they decide how best to resolve a dispute - and how to keep it in proportion.
The legal services market is also an important part of the UK economy. We want to increase the amount of international legal business coming into the UK and support the effective provision of private legal services.
Publicly funded legal services must be used efficiently and according to priority need to promote social justice and economic well-being and to tackle social exclusion. Our work covers both publicly and privately funded legal services.
The Legal Services Commission (LSC), which replaced the Legal Aid Board on 1 April 2000, fulfils the above duties on behalf of the Lord Chancellor. Its statutory functions are to establish, develop and maintain the Community Legal Service (CLS) and the Criminal Defence Service (CDS).
The CLS sets up partnerships between the funders and providers of legal help and advice so they can deliver services that meet local needs and priorities. Similarly, the CDS provides legal advice and representation to those involved in criminal investigations or proceedings.
The Community Legal Service aims to reduce social exclusion and support communities by providing accessible legal advice and funding for cases in priority areas of law.
People should have access to effective legal and advice services. The Community Legal Service was launched in April 2000 to improve access so that people can resolve potential or actual disputes and enforce their rights effectively. The CLS also aims to obtain the best value for taxpayers' money. The CLS consists of four inter-related elements:
| Target To increase the number of people who receive suitable assistance in priority areas of law involving fundamental rights or social exclusion by 5% by 2004 (PSA 6a). |
The Methods of Delivery pilot has been set up with the aim of identifying alternative and innovative ways of delivering publicly funded legal services to achieve greater public access and improve the quality of service provided.
We commissioned the Legal Services Research Centre to undertake a long-term research project that considers the nature and frequency of problems that people face which could be resolved through the justice system (and what they did about them). The first national periodic survey was carried out in summer 2001; there will be further surveys over the next two years. The surveys will provide an ongoing comprehensive national picture of unmet legal need in social welfare.
The interim findings from the survey were received in September 2002. They showed that each year around one million justiciable problems remain unreported - a quarter of these through fear of the possible consequences. The findings also gave valuable empirical evidence supporting our assertion that advice services underpin the aims of many other government departments and programmes aimed at tackling social exclusion. They also demonstrated the extent to which people can face more than one problem, each leading on from another. This confirms the value of early advice in order to prevent problems spiralling.
The LSC's Regional Legal Services Committees (RLSCs) assess local priorities for civil and family legal help. They are responsible for making the Community Legal Service Partnerships aware of the regional perspective when making recommendations about local funding and priorities. The Lord Chancellor has set national priorities, including cases involving the welfare of children, cases that help people to avoid or climb out of social exclusion, and cases with a wider public interest.
Community Legal Service Partnerships (CLSPs) bring together public, private and voluntary organisations with an interest in legal and advice services and involve funders, providers and users of those services in planning and delivering improvements.
| Target To extend the coverage of integrated local CLS Partnerships to 100% of the population in England and Wales by March 2004 (SDA 11). |
There are 213 CLS Partnerships involving 398 local authorities and covering over 99% of the population of England and Wales as at September 2002. We are confident that we will reach 100% population coverage by March 2004.
The LSC has developed a number of techniques to ensure that it is funding a good service:
All advisers should have sufficient training in their particular areas of law. The LSC is developing, in conjunction with leading advice providers in each category of law, individual competencies in the knowledge and skills for each category of law. These could eventually be contained within a nationally recognised framework. The LSC is supporting this work further by increasing the percentage of our funding that goes to legal services providers holding a Quality Mark.
There are a number of ways the CLS is helping local communities. For example:
In order to encourage CLSPs to improve service delivery and to develop new ideas, the Lord Chancellor launched the Partnership Innovation Budget (now renamed the Partnership Initiative Budget) in May 2001. The first round of the PIB, worth £15 million over 3 years, is being used to support 76 projects, and these include:
Round two of the PIB will be worth an additional £6 million. Bids were submitted through local CLSPs in January 2003, with notification of the successful bids expected at the end of April.
The CLS has a fundamental part to play in the Government's Neighbourhood Renewal agenda and the fight against social exclusion. Both LCD and the LSC are working closely with other government departments to ensure a joined-up approach. CLS Partnerships are involved in a range of initiatives including Local Strategy Partnerships, Connexions and the New Deal. LCD and JobcentrePlus have drawn up joint guidance for frontline staff in Jobcentres, making them aware of when referral to a CLS provider is appropriate.
The Community Legal Service Fund replaced civil legal aid in April 2000. The Fund resources civil legal and advice services. The LSC contracts with solicitors' firms and not-for-profit agencies to provide quality legal services targeted at national and local needs.
Through the contracting system there has been a move away from traditional case-by-case management of publicly funded legal services. Not only do contracts give suppliers an incentive to deliver value for money, but they also allow the LSC's auditors to check that the suppliers are doing the work they claim they are doing.
Since January 2000 all civil legal help and representation in family, immigration and mental health cases and multi-party actions has been delivered through contracts with quality-assured suppliers. In April 2001 contracts were let for representation in all other civil cases. Contracts are only awarded to suppliers who hold the CLS Quality Mark.
Within the CLS, there are 4,681 General Civil Contracts with solicitors' firms and 414 with not-for-profit agencies (at January 2003).
We increased the initial threshold for financial eligibility to gross income of £2,250 per month in August 2002, for all levels of service under the CLS. In addition, the threshold was raised to take account of people who have large numbers of dependants, and for those in receipt of certain state benefits. Where an individual has more than four dependent children and is in receipt of child benefit, there will be an additional allowance of £145 in respect of the fifth and each subsequent child. Certain benefits may be excluded when assessing gross income.
Proceedings concerning the detention and forfeiture of cash under the Proceeds of Crime Act 2002 in the Crown Court and magistrates' courts have been brought within the scope of CLS funding. Applications are subject to means testing and the LSC will provide public funding when it is in the interests of justice for the applicant to be represented.
In December 2002 the Lord Chancellor issued a direction under section 6(8) of the Access to Justice Act 1999 to bring the Special Immigration Appeals Commission (SIAC) into the scope of CLS funding. The LSC is now able to fund SIAC cases directly and applications can now be dealt with more promptly.
The CLS Quality Mark, launched in April 2000, assures the public of the quality of legal and advice services.
By December 2002 over 10,000 organisations (ranging from information points in libraries, doctors' surgeries, police stations and prisons to specialists such as solicitors' firms and barristers' chambers) had been accredited with the Quality Mark.
The Quality Mark incorporates standards in:
The take up of the information standard of the Quality Mark has been high. For many people, CLS Information Points are the first point of entry to the Community Legal Service. In December 2002 there were over 2,300 information points (including all county courts in England and Wales and all libraries in the Eastern regions) throughout England and Wales. We want every JobcentrePlus office to become an information point and we are exploring ways to set up Information Points at Post Offices and increase the existing number in prisons, doctors' surgeries and police stations. The fourth edition of the LSC's How to Find Legal Help and Information Directory of Legal Service Providers, published in April 2002, now includes only those service providers who have received or applied for the Quality Mark.
We have continued to work with the LSC to develop the Quality Mark further in order for it to cover more methods of service delivery. During 2002 Quality Mark standards for organisations providing legal information on websites, advice services provided by student advice agencies and Race Equality Councils came into operation.
We are also committed to promoting greater consistency across the major quality assurance standards that are currently in operation. In January this year, jointly with the LSC, we published a booklet Making Quality Connections which explores the options for benchmarking the Quality Mark against other standards such as CharterMark, Investors in People and the Excellence Model.
We launched our CLS website, Just Ask!, in April 2000. The website forms an integral part of the Community Legal Service, supporting legal services on the ground 24 hours a day. It provides users with:
Just Ask! has been maintained and managed by the LSC since October 2001. Over the last year the following milestones have been achieved:
Web address: www.justask.org.uk
The Criminal Defence Service (CDS) provides services through a flexible system of contracts with private sector lawyers and a small number of public defenders, to achieve quality-assured services and value for money.
Through contracts, solicitors' firms provide defence services ranging from advice at the police station to representation at the magistrates' court. Although firms need to have contracts in order to do CDS work in the Crown Court, the contracts cover only quality requirements, not payments. We intend to extend the full scope of contracting, including payments, to the Crown Court.
The LSC has begun to introduce individual case contracts for solicitors for Crown Court cases that last more than 25 days or cost over £150,000 — Very High Cost Criminal Cases (VHCCCs) — to make sure they are managed effectively and that costs are controlled.
Many VHCCCs concern allegations of serious fraud and only firms who have demonstrated their ability to handle such specialist cases, and are members of the Specialist Fraud Panel, can undertake them.
The LSC is piloting a Public Defender Service (PDS) over a four-year period. The PDS employs advocates who work only on publicly funded criminal defence cases. Six offices opened in Birmingham, Cheltenham, Liverpool, Middlesbrough, Pontypridd and Swansea in 2001-02. In February 2003 two further offices were opened in Chester and Darlington as satellite offices respectively of Liverpool and Middlesbrough. The first Annual Report and the researchers' methodology paper were published on 2 September 2002.
The PDS pilot will give a valuable insight into the costs of running a defence solicitor's office, which in turn will help us to make better decisions about funding criminal defence cases. It should also give greater flexibility and choice in the delivery of criminal defence services.
Respecting the rights of defendants is an integral part of the whole criminal justice system (CJS). The Lord Chancellor's Department has a unique role in doing this: our objective is to ensure that all defendants are given proper legal advice and support in order to present their cases and receive a fair trial. In addition, LCD leads the CJS on monitoring the way the whole system respects the rights of defendants. These measures and our performance against them are set out in Chapter 2.
| Target To secure year-on-year improvements in value for money in the delivery of the Community Legal Service and the Criminal Defence Service (PSA 9). |
It is important that we target publicly funded legal services on the most deserving cases and so we let contracts according to local and national priorities. From April to June 2001, 78% of CLS expenditure was on quality-assured suppliers.
| Target To ensure that 95% of expenditure on the Criminal Defence Service and from the Community Legal Service Fund is on services provided by quality-assured suppliers by March 2004 (SDA 23). |
99% of CDS expenditure from July to September 2001 was on quality-assured suppliers, although this excludes work in the Crown and Higher Courts.
| Target To reduce Community Legal Service and Criminal Defence Service cost inflation to 0.5% per year by March 2004 (SDA 25). |
The demand for publicly funded legal services continues to increase, and the Department has been under continuous pressure to obtain and provide funding to meet this increased demand. We held a Joint Review with HM Treasury to identify areas where opportunities for savings, improvement and further development exist. As a result, we have now set up a project to review the demand, supply and contracting arrangements for legal services. The intended outcome is that remuneration rates would be set at levels which encourage suppliers to conduct the work more efficiently and cost-effectively.
The Community Legal Service seeks to prevent problems developing into confrontational legal disputes. As part of our work under PSA 5 to reduce the proportion of cases resolved by resort to the courts, we are encouraging the use of Alternative Dispute Resolution (ADR), while recognising that some situations can only be resolved by an external authority.
ADR is an umbrella term that encompasses processes such as mediation, complaints and ombudsman schemes, arbitration and early neutral evaluation. However, complaints and ombudsman schemes do not receive public funding - they are funded by the relevant bodies or sectors, with no charge to the client.
| Target To increase the number of disputes resolved with funding from the Community Legal Service through Alternative Dispute Resolution, including mediation (SDA 13). |
We are currently working with the LSC and their Research Centre to establish a new baseline for ADR, once the full Legal Needs Survey has been published. The new baseline will be available by April 2004.
A brief report on the effects of the Government's pledge, announced by the Lord Chancellor in March 2001, that all government departments and agencies will consider and use ADR where appropriate and when the other party accepts it, was published in July 2002. It reported that ADR had been used or attempted in 49 disputes, and that the Treasury Solicitor's Department estimated an overall saving in legal costs of £2.5 million as a result.
In general, we encourage and promote the increased use of ADR. An example of ADR in action is the new scheme at the Birmingham Civil Trial Centre, launched by the Lord Chancellor on 7 December 2001, which offers mediation to parties in defended cases of £5,000 or more. In 2002, 43 mediations took place. A new court-based scheme at Exeter was launched in March 2003. In addition, the Legal Services Commission promotes non-court resolution in areas of publicly funded clinical negligence and housing disputes.
A priority for the Department is to improve access to justice and to underpin economic success by promoting legal and dispute resolution services. This can be achieved through the provision of effective publicly funded legal services. It can also be achieved through working to make the market deliver more effective and more accessible private legal services.
The key elements where the Department can make a difference are through:
We set up a Market Intelligence Unit to provide economic analysis and intelligence about the legal services market. The Unit informs the development of evidence-based policy and decision-making aimed at improving market competitiveness and is helping us to understand better the market for legal services. This supports sounder civil justice and trade policy and work to help the legal sector, as a service industry, become an ever more productive direct and indirect contributor to the national economy. The Unit has produced a comprehensive market overview of civil legal services and worked on a range of analytic projects including analysis of the mechanics of the legal services market, the competitive implications of new professional rules and proposed changes to the professions, and assessment of the litigation funding market.
We also continue to scrutinise the performance of the professional bodies to improve standards across the industry, particularly in complaints handling and to ensure that consumers' interests are represented when policy decisions on the sector's operation and regulation are taken.
We continue to monitor the performance of the Office of the Legal Services Ombudsman so that it:
The Legal Services Ombudsman (LSO), Ms Ann Abraham, left to take up her appointment as Parliamentary Commissioner for Administration and Health Service Commissioner for England. The Lord Chancellor appointed Mr Paul Salvidge to fill the gap prior to Ms Zahida Manzoor taking up the position as the new LSO on 3 March 2003.
In most cases, open and competitive markets are the best way to ensure that consumers get the best possible service but the public interest in protecting consumers and ensuring probity is an important factor.
In July 2002 we published our consultation paper In the public interest? on competition issues, including the opening up of the conveyancing and probate markets, multi-disciplinary practices and other new business structures for providing legal services, legal professional privilege, and the QC system. Responses are being analysed and policy proposals will follow.
The Government has also announced a review of the regulatory framework for legal services, with the aim of ensuring that the regulatory regime supports a dynamic and competitive market with appropriate levels of consumer protection. A scoping study is under way to assist Government to settle the parameters of the review and the machinery for completing it. We expect to make a public announcement on the matters raised in the consultation paper and on the review before the summer break. As well as the consultation, we are actively engaged with other competition issues as they affect competition, innovation and excellence in the legal services market.
In April 2000 we introduced fundamental changes to the funding regime for civil litigation. Essentially most personal injury cases were taken out of scope of eligibility for public funding and are now funded through conditional fee agreements or legal expenses insurance.
Our aim is to help provide more certainty and stability on legal costs and to encourage the further development of innovative funding for legal services to ensure improved access to justice.
The market has responded actively to the changes, delivering a diverse range of litigation funding products to meet the needs of most personal injury cases, and developing gradually in typically more complex areas of litigation such as clinical negligence, commercial disputes, insolvency and libel. However, the significance of the changes has led to a relatively unsettled period as the legal professions, insurers, accident intermediaries and the courts have worked with the new rules and the parameters of the new regime have been tested in a number of test cases - mostly concerning straightforward personal injury claims.
We have been working with the legal services sector and other key interested parties to address any difficulties and to find ways to make the new regime work better. A key role has been played by the Civil Justice Council in this process and in particular in working towards a fixed recoverable costs scheme in pre-court proceedings road traffic accident cases up to £10,000 in value. This work will continue in 2003-04. In this period our priorities will include:
We are looking to capitalise on and increase the quality and competitiveness of British legal services in the global market. The UK's legal services sector is a major source of export revenue, generating a conservatively estimated £1.6 billion in the year ending 2001. In order to ensure that this success is sustained, we are taking steps to maintain an innovative and competitive domestic market while contributing to the development of new markets for providers of legal services. This has a positive knock-on effect for the success of other UK exports given the central function lawyers play in all aspects of international commerce and finance.
We aim to increase the opportunities for UK legal services providers to capture an increasing share of the international market for legal services by:
In conjunction with the Department of Trade and Industry and the European Union, we are taking a leading role in seeking to reduce barriers to international trade in legal services through the current Round of WTO negotiations.
We participate in the Law Society's taskforces on a number of countries in which we know there to be a demand for our services but where access to the market is restricted.
In the last year we have developed networks and alliances with other EU and World Trade Organisation members in both Brussels and Geneva where the bulk of the multilateral negotiations take place. Our efforts in working with the DTI and the European Commission to maximise the UK's influence in this area are beginning to pay dividends as we see other nations showing an increasing interest in the area and a more progressive, ambitious attitude to international legal practice.
A concrete example of our activity in this area is provided by our continued efforts to persuade the Japanese Government to allow our firms to form full partnerships with their Japanese counterparts. This would enable them jointly to deliver a more comprehensive and cost-effective range of services to both Japanese and foreign clients. We are confident that the coming year will see this pressure bear fruit.
We are also encouraging foreign market liberalisation through other organisations including the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD). In addition, while the European Union has established a system to facilitate the provision of legal services across the 15 member states, we remain alert to the need to guard against any threat to that system. We will also be taking a leading role during the enlargement process in ensuring that the regime is fully extended to new members of the EU.
We use a variety of existing and new channels in our promotion of the sector's strengths.
We are working closely with British Trade International's export arm, Trade Partners UK, and the sector to deliver an Industry Briefing Course for 20 commercial officers posted in our embassies in key target markets around the world.
The course will provide those working on our trade and investment priorities overseas with a sound understanding of the characteristics, structure and strengths of the United Kingdom's legal services system. Specialists from all parts of the legal sector, including the Bar, law firms and the Court Service will provide detailed and practical training. Commercial officers will return to their posts overseas with a full appreciation of the economic indicators which will assist them in identifying a demand for legal services which UK providers are well or uniquely placed to satisfy.
We are developing the first ever Guide to UK Legal Services for use as the key reference tool in the majority of our embassies, bringing together relevant official and commercial material. It will also provide them with practical information so that they are able to capitalise effectively on new opportunities for export in their markets.
We are also working with the British Trade International's (BTI) Government Group to support other sector exporters through early access to legal advice and by increasing the number of law firms (especially those in the regions) engaged in international work
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