£3.1 million access to justice funding now fully awarded

MoJ and the Access to Justice Foundation (ATJF) have announced today that they have ‘fully awarded’ £3.1 million funding to 11 new projects that cover more than 50 different organisations across England and Wales that are providing advice and guidance to those without legal representation.

At the regional level, just under £1 million has been awarded to 3 new partnerships:

- North and Mid-Wales, where seven Citizens Advice branches in the region have partnered with Bangor University to increase access to legal advice and support.
- the North East of England, where 13 local organisations will set up two virtual support hubs, sharing their expertise and allowing people to access specialist advice from anywhere in the region.
- Devon and Cornwall, where nine organisations have come together to establish a network of specialist support across both counties.

At the local level, just under £1 million has been awarded to 5 new partnerships:

- Suffolk and Norfolk, where a new service will take mobile, free legal advice out to people who cannot normally access it.
- Mid and North Yorkshire, where the capacity of specialist legal advice will be expanded, including a rural outreach service.
- Greater Manchester and North Lancashire, where two new community hubs will be set up to help people work through a broad range of issues.
- the East and West Midlands, where access to support will be strengthened and expanded into new parts of the local area.
- Dorset and South Somerset, where 9 organisations will work together to provide more access to specialist advice and share their expertise to train more advisers.

NB - the MOJ and ATJF had already awarded more than £500,000 to a number of larger charities to provide new national-level services:

- Support Through Court and RCJ Advice – who are partnering to expand STC’s national telephone helpline to include the addition of new family referral routes into RCJ Advice, as well as piloting a new remote support initiative.
- LawWorks – who will scale up their Free Legal Answers website service, which enables people on low incomes and not eligible for legal aid to access free, initial legal advice by describing their issue, or asking direct questions.
- Law for Life – who will add new resources to their Advicenow website to assist people to deal with a range of legal problems, as well as creating new guidance to help individuals appear in the virtual court effectively. They will also use the new funding to undertake research to expand understanding of digital and legal capability.

More:
https://www.gov.uk/government/news/3-1-million-for-support-to-those-representing-themselves-in-court
https://atjf.org.uk/legal-support-for-litigants-in-person-grant

More info in a letter from the Minister to the Chair of the Justice Select Committee ...

- £270k of the £3.1m was allocated as emergency funding last summer through the ATJF’s Community Justice Fund.

- At the local level, funding is being used to scale-up existing provision to increase the reach and impact of crucial frontline services and help organisations target issues that they know to be particularly prevalent in their local area.

- All of the local projects will put the use of technology at the heart of service delivery, learning lessons from how they have had to adapt to the COVID-19 pandemic and assessing how innovation can continue to benefit users once life begins to transition to a sense of normality.

- At the regional level, funding is aimed at developing services for litigants in person in areas where it can have the most impact and to build up partnership and expertise to encourage collaboration across organisations providing legal support.

- MoJ will use evaluation of the funded projects and partnerships to ‘shape future policy proposals in a way that isn’t currently possible’ and to draw together a clearer picture from which the sector can learn and develop more informed funding applications, and the ATJF can use to inform its own funding decisions.

https://committees.parliament.uk/publications/4482/documents/45122/default/