Here's what:

A comparison of the numbers of specialist legal advice providers, contracted or non-contracted, based in READING, BERKS, before and after 1 April 2007, by area of law:

Actions against the police – 1 - 0
Clinical Negligence – 1 - 1
Community care - 2 - 0
Consumer and general contract – 4 - 0
Crime - 13 - 11
Debt - 2 - 2
Benefits - 2 - 2
EducatioN - 3 - 0
Employment - 6 - 0
Family - 11 - 4
Housing - 5 - 0
Immigration - 2 - 0
Mental Health - 2 - 0
Public law - 1 - 0


Comparison is based the current internet CLS director and a previous CD rom version. As you can see, where we used to have mutiple providers in virtually every area of law, we now only have providers in five areas of law - two of which are provided by us and CAB.

Please post up similiar tables for your own areas.

The internet CLS director is not always accurate. While I am sure that firms have stopped doing legal aid work, our firm is no longer on the internet CLS and we did sign the new contract(albeit reluctantly).

Wed 09-May-07 04:46 PM by Tony Bowman

That's interesting - thanks. Do you know why you're not listed on the directory?

I'll survey those firms that were listed but are now not, but I know that one firm - probably the largest in the area, and dealing with multiple areas of law, has stopped taking new clients.

Even if they are still working but are not listed in the directory, that's pretty worrying in itself, as some people could be falsely lead to believe that they cannot be helped with their legal problem.

I've been doing some more checking and in fact is seems that the directory is somewhat unreliable.

Some of those firms previously listed as doing certain areas of work have told me they never did so, and firms not previously listed on my search have now popped up, including one that has told us they are not doing any more work.

Oh well... as an item of social policy not that impactful after all, but still a mess nonetheless.