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Law For All in administration
Sadly, it has been confirmed that Law For All is in administration. This charitable advice service based in Ealing, provided social welfare law advice across the London boroughs of Ealing, Hillingdon, Hounslow and Richmond, as well as in East Anglia and the Midlands. Is was set up in 1994 and helped thousands of people every year. There’s a statement from trustees on their website:
The trustees of Law For All, the largest not-for-profit provider of legal services in West London, have, with regret, placed the company into the hands of administrators.
Law For All, a registered charity, was established in 1994 to provide high quality advice and casework in social welfare law to poor and vulnerable people – who were not otherwise able to afford or access them – at a cost that provided good value for money for the public purse. As such, a major source of Law For All’s income came from the Legal Services Commission, as the public body administering legal aid.
At the height of its operations, Law For All provided help to clients across three London boroughs and in Suffolk, Norfolk, Cambridgeshire, Northamptonshire and Staffordshire. It assisted 15,000 clients per year and took cases to all levels of the court and tribunal systems.
However, recent years have proved extremely difficult as changes to the administration of publicly funded legal work have resulted in an unsustainable administrative burden, together with an increasingly complicated funding mechanism – not to mention reduced payments in real terms.
These factors, combined with current plans by the Government to cut legal aid payments by a further 10% this autumn, and to almost completely end legal aid in October 2012, have led the trustees, reluctantly, to conclude that there is no hope of a viable long-term future for Law For All.
[ Edited: 30 Jul 2011 at 10:19 pm by Paul Treloar ]