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LSC Specialist Support Service consultation
The Legal Services Commission (LSC) has launched a consultation on the future funding of the Specialist Support Service.
The consultation period opened on Friday 30 March, and the deadline for responses is Friday 11 May 2012.
They are keen to hear from anyone with an interest in or experience of the issues covered by this consultation. Essentially, the want to scrap Specialist Support Services completely, although their rationale for this proposal doesn’t necessarily stand up to scrutiny.
For example, at 5.4 of the consultation paper, they say that a “report suggests that contracted providers with a specialist contract in the area they are calling about have an over reliance on the Specialist Support Service –particularly in the categories of Housing and Welfare Benefits – possibly as a replacement for in house supervision”.
In the next paragraph, however, they state that “Current contracting arrangements mean that there should be significantly less need in today’s environment to support these providers, with the services’ stated purpose of raising their competence having been addressed by other means”.
Thus they identify what they believe to be a cause for using Specialist Support as being a lack of in-house supervision (even though this is not evidenced in any way), before going onto say that contracting arrangements should preclude this from happening in the first case. They also flag up the lack of Specialist Support for family and education cases as being another reason why it should be scrapped in other areas of law, which is a completely reductive approach in thinking.
Currently, LSC funds nine Specialist Support organisations (including Lasa) to provide a second tier, expert service in civil categories of law to eligible organisations. Specialist Support covers:
* housing
* welfare benefits
* debt
* employment
* immigration
* community care
* public law
* mental health
Contracts with the Specialist Support organisations are due to expire on 30 June 2012.
More details on the consultation can be found at Specialist Support Services
[ Edited: 2 Apr 2012 at 02:09 pm by Paul Treloar ]I don’t read it say that there’s a lack of in-house supervision. Rather I think the example says that specialist support is duplicating what in-house supervision should provide,and that contracting terms include adequate provision of supervision (the LSC supervision standards) thereby negating the requirement for specialist support.
I think that’s probably true to some extent. I’ve always wondered why ‘specialist support’ is often offered to specilist advisers… That is something of LSC’s doing however when they insist on services available only to specialist advisers (how many of you know your contract number?).
Specialist support is needed, but the specialist’s should provide it to the generlists rather than to themselves. That’s a matter of policy.
1) Whether or not in-house supervision is available, are you seriously suggesting that specialist advisers should only ever need to check with their own supervisor? You don’t agree that often, checking with someone outside of their organisation isn’t actually a better idea, to get a fresh opinion? Take that thinking to a logical extreme and you could make a case that SQM contract holders on welfare benefits shouldn’t be allowed to access rightsnet either.
2) Specialist support isn’t only available to specialist advisers, its available to SQM but also to General Help QM with casework.
3) For welfare benefits Specialist Support, the stats given are that 68% of calls were from LSC contracted provider with a contract in the area they are calling about, 7% from LSC contracted provider without a specialist contract in the area they are calling about, and 25% from Non-LSC contracted provider, so more than a quarter of current provision does indeed go to people who are not specialists in welfare benefits, however you define that.