Gareth Morgan
Managing Director, Ferret Information Systems, Cardiff
Member since
20th Feb 2004
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RE: New Community Legal Services five-year strategy published
Fri 24-Mar-06 09:44 AM |
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I'm much more concerned by the DCA paper that came out on the same day, 'Getting earlier, better advice to vulnerable people', you can get it at
http://www.dca.gov.uk/laid/civilaid.htm
After reading it through once, I feel that I need to complain to the OED that there is clearly a major ommission under the word 'independant' of the definition being used by the DCA.
As a flavour, some extracts.
"... current provision is targeted at treating specific issues in isolation. It is hard to access, and the referral mechanisms between providers are often inefficient. This means that, particularly for vulnerable people, advice can be hard to reach. Web-based information aimed at helping those people capable of resolving problems and disputes themselves is useful, but Government-funded web sites are hard to find and difficult to understand.
4. These difficulties stem from the uncoordinated and fragmented way in which both central and local Government fund and commission advice services.
It is therefore important that different areas of Government work more effectively together to commission advice that fits people’s needs"
"The Legal Services Commission (LSC) should work in partnership with
local authorities, prioritising those areas with significant levels of deprivation, to co-locate independent advice services, creating single centres that are more widely known and better able to deal with the full range of problems that people face."
"...we recommend that, as part of the ‘Local Visioning’ programme, the DCA work with the Office of the Deputy Prime Minister (ODPM) to use the type and number of cases coming to advice agencies and tribunals to inform and plan local public service performance."
"...Government invests significant amounts of money in the commissioning of independent advice, but this is fragmented and uncoordinated.
This means that independent advice is not focused on people’s needs,
has low awareness and doesn’t take advantage of opportunities to feed back to service providers."
"Our research suggests that people need clear, well-known brands to help them navigate the range of services available and the majority of the independent advice sector is made up of a large number of small providers."
"We believe that this low awareness and lack of effective referral between advice providers is a result of the uncoordinated way that Government funds and commissions these services. The result is a fragmented and uncoordinated provider base, which is confusing for the public, and where resources for awareness raising activity are spread thinly."
"...limited guidance from central Government departments, results in a lack of coherent systems for the planning, management and delivery of independent advice."
"central and local Government must work together to commission independent advice services that more effectively focus on people’s needs and that are delivered in places, at times and in ways that best allow people to use them."
"We recommend that this be achieved by implementing the Community
Legal Advice Centre pilots proposed in the LSC’s 5 year Strategy for
the Community Legal Service with a view to rolling these out if successful."
"The proposals for Community Legal Advice Centres and for Community Legal Advice Networks aim to bring advice for the full range of problems that people have into one centre or a network of centres, depending on local need."
"To ensure that the development of centres and networks is deliverable and sustainable at a local level and can be performance managed in a robust but proportionate way, funding should be made available through Local Area Agreements."
"Independent advice services therefore have considerable amounts of information useful for public service providers to help improve their interaction and engagement with vulnerable and socially excluded people.... information such as the number and type of disputes coming to advice agencies and tribunals could be an effective proxy to measure the effectiveness of public services....the information needs to be effectively collated by the tribunals and advice agencies...The current fragmentation of independent advice represents a barrier to collecting this information. However, the proposed move towards one-stop shops represents an ideal opportunity to build this collation of information into the service design template, and this should be done."
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