How it can be

With most people back from holiday now, we're carrying on with the story about the Hammersmith and Fulham Tory Council's cutting of more than half of the Hammersmith and Fulham Community Law Centre's annual grant. The thousands of people in the borough who can't afford to pay for legal advice and representation will be most affected.

This site has been talking to Law Centre clients this year about the reasons why they sought legal advice and representation from the centre. There are more interviews with Law Centre clients under the Similar Entries heading in the right menu.

Sophia El-Kaddah, a 22-year-old who is severely disabled with cerebral palsy, is one of those people. The Law Centre is helping her take a case against the Acton Housing Association, which refused for a year to carry out promised accessibility modifications to Sophia's Acton Town flat.

Sophia is confined to a wheelchair, is unable to move on her own, and needs 24-hour care. She was studying for a national diploma in health and social care, but left, because her disability and health problems made the attendance requirements difficult for her.

She signed the contract for her flat in 2005. She says that feels like a while ago: the adjustments to the flat that the Association agreed to carry out before she moved in still haven't been finished. Acting on Sophia's behalf, the Law Centre managed to push the Housing Association to do some of the adjustments, so that Sophia could at least move into her flat:

'I signed a contract for my flat, but I couldn't move in for eight months, because they wouldn't carry out the adjustments. The occupational therapist [who assessed me before I moved in] said that I could move into this flat as long as the flat was adjusted for me. The Housing Association agreed to that. This flat was purposely built for a walking disabled person, so they needed to do a lot of extra work for me - things like lowering the toilet, and putting in the electric door-opener and hoists.

'They did not do the works. I was still living with my Mum then, because I couldn't move into my flat. We called [the Housing Association] by phone and wrote letters. We wrote to Director of Social Services at Ealing [Council].

'They did not respond. They never responded to me. I had already moved in my washing-machine and my dryer and my microwave. I didn't know what they were doing. The occupational therapist said I could move in as long as the flat was modified. A few months after the Law Centre started writing letters to them, they (the Housing Association) said to me that if they had known how disabled I was, they would not have let me move into the flat.

'The Law Centre tried to secure dates for the adaptations to be done. They were completed enough for me to move in, and we are taking them to court for the remainder of the works. There are still problems here which make it very hard for me. I have had to try and adapt to using a shower instead of a bath. They have said now that they will pay for half of the oustanding works, but that they won't look after the modifications, or maintain them. I don't know why they didn't say all of this at the start, when they said I could move into the flat. Why did they do it like this?'

Immigrants are nice. Tories are tossers

As we have been reporting, the Hammersmith Law Centre will lose 60% of its funding in cuts voted for by the Tory Hammersmith and Fulham Council. Thousands of poorer people in the borough will lose access to the free legal advice and representation that the centre has provided for nearly 30 years.

This site is adding interviews with people who have gone to the law centre for legal help and advice over the years. Law centre clients are often immigrants and people seeking asylum.

Below, law centre client Salah Almesaouil talks a bit about moving to London. He has been a client of the law centre for some years, and had help with Home Office and housing problems.

Salah Almesaouil is a small, witty guy from Syria who lives with his wife and eight young children in a three-bedroom council flat in a West London block called Hamlet Gardens. 'Good flat,' he says, as his four littlest kids stampede through it. 'Bit small, maybe, for ten of us living here. Bit small.'

He's not exactly complaining about his general direction of travel, though: the UK remains a land of opportunity as far as he is concerned, and he and his kids are taking it.

His three eldest - teenagers Heba, Mohamad and Hamza - are doing well in school, particularly in the scary subjects: Heba is studying A-level chemistry, physics and maths, Mohamad is taking A-levels in maths, applied science and computing, and Hamza is sitting GCSEs in science, double science, maths, English language and literature, RE, design and technology, history, French and Arabic.

They want to be doctors and computer engineers and that kind of thing. Almesauouil is a happy Dad.

Ten years ago, while still in the Middle East, Almesauouil was a farmer and a shop-owner. He'd spent most of his life in Syria and Jordan. He left the area permanently in 1998 because, he says, of a less-than-convivial relationship with the Syrian government.

He won't go into the details of that relationship at the moment: suffice to say, he says, that you don't have to make a lot of trouble to be considered a lot of trouble in some parts of the world.

'I had some problems in Syria. The government in Syria is not a democracy. They ask about me. They would ask about me. It was not secure. It has not changed. Then, it was not safe in Jordan if you're Syrian.'

So began Almesaouil's life on the Middle Eastern immigration circuit - a place that is not without its amusing aspect, Almesaouil says.

What you have at the moment, he says, are large numbers of people in the Middle East who are desperate to escape the fallout of UK foriegn policy in the Middle East. The witty part is that they largely want to do this by moving to the UK.

Syria is full of Iraqis who want to get away from the US-UK Iraq war, and move to the UK, because they think that life here is good and the people are civilised. London, meanwhile, is full of Iraqis who want to get away the US-UK war in Iraq, and move to the UK, because they think that life here is good and the people are civilised.

The upshot is that everybody in the Middle East is moving here and moving there and hoping to be allowed to stay in the Western countries that are busy trying to wipe the Middle East off the map. Things have been shambling along in this kooky tenor for a while. Almesaouil laughs. That's why he loves London, he says. Everybody's here. Western foriegn policy keeps them coming. It's one of the most multicultural places that he's been.

Almesaouil is a British citizen now. He's training as a lorry driver, and he's keen to start work soon. He'll sit one more test in July, and then he'll be underway.

He found the Home Office a challenging place when he first came to the UK seeking asylum. His application to stay was turned down, as first applications often are. Almesaouil believes that the Home Office failed to understand the trouble that being known to authorities in Syria can cause an individual. He is a little vague with the details.

'The reason [for the failed application] from the Home Office - [my explanation wasn't accepted]. They did not understand what this case is about, my case in Syria. It is plain [to me], about the reason. I cannot do it myself. I need one solicitor to go through it for me, step by step.'

He won the right to stay in the UK on appeal. He says that 'of course' he misses Syrian and Jordan, and that he is a little concerned that the children will either forget that part of the world, or never see it, or see it only through Western eyes . 'It's a long time. Just me really knows what Syria is like. My children are from here.'

'Yep,' Mohamad says. 'We're combinations.'

'It is easy to live here,' Almesauouil says. 'If you try to make it, try to have a good job, try to [do well] in a good school.
'My children do well at school. It's home for the children. It's very, very good for them, and very interesting.
My family is happy now. We're all together and they are studying. They are safe. It's difficult for the children when you change where they live.'

He says that he finds London 'very good, very welcoming.' He doesn't find people xenophobic: he can't quite understand why some people claim things are difficult for immigrants here. He feels that the main obstacle he faced here was the Home Office: other than that, he's been welcomed, supported and able to watch his kids succeed. What's not to like?

Making black history

Helena Ismail is British, very nicely-spoken, clever, committed to her community, and able to take a measured view of life's many shambles - except, perhaps, local and national politics. Right now, for instance, she seems pretty close to flattening whomever next claims that David Cameron's Tories are reformed and almost human. 'They (the Tories at Hammersmith and Fulham Council) have cut our throats,' she says tightly. 'They are targeting us. I tell you this. Why are they doing that?'

Ismail has run the much-admired Shepherd's Bush Somali support group Horn of Africa for 20 years, where she and her team provide an annual average of 3000 to 4000 poor, usually desperate, people with the immigration, employment and schools advice that they needed to settle in the UK, and get jobs, etc. Horn of Africa also does a good second line in helping newcomers to the country fill in forms and to get their heads round obligations like council tax. Horn of Africa will also help if you need to know how to deal with the many zealous coppers who play a large part in your life if you're poor, young and black.

The party's more or less over, though. In April this year, Hammersmith and Fulham's ghastly Tory council took a decision to cut exactly one hundred percent of Horn of Africa's funding (some £55,000 a year), as part of a charming borough rape of black and ethnic minority voluntary groups (other Somali groups like the youth support Hope 4 All organisation also got nothing, while African and African-Caribbean support group Nubian Life got less than half the funding it received in 2006. You'll find the full funding report here pdf 404kb). The cuts took effect this month.

Ismail is still deciding which part of this experience has been the most insulting. She says that the council's surpreme dismissiveness ranks pretty high. 'I've been running this centre for 20 years in the borough, and dealing with the council, and they did not even tell me that they were thinking about taking all our funding. There was no time that they tried to talk to me while they must have been making that decision. They didn't speak to us.' Indeed, at a now-legendary April 2007 public meeting on the funding cuts, the council's cabinet ran out of the room when Ismail got up to ask council leader Stephen Greenhalgh why her organisation had been targeted.

The council's claims that it will continue to help vulnerable Somalis is also near the top of the list of insults. 'That is rubbish. It is very hard to duplicate what we're doing. There will be nobody to support them (newcomers from Somalia) in the north of the borough. There will be nobody here if we go.'

A group called Firsthand will get some money to run a community centre with sports and club activities on the White City Estate, and good luck to them, but they won't be doing the same thing as Horn of Africa (they have also been instructed to make sure 'income from their building is maximised' (you'll find this under the Firsthand heading in the downloadable report above).

There won't be too much in the way of employment, housing, education, and immigration advice in the area when Horn of Africa goes. There's the hugely-underresourced Shepherd's Bush Advice Centre, and the beleaguered Hammersmith and Fulham Community Law Centre. Both have resource problems of their own: the Shepherd's Bush Advice Centre has been threatened by cuts in the last few years, and the Tories just cut the Law Centre's annual grant by more than £100,000). That means there'll be another three to four thousand people a year wandering the streets of Shepherd's Bush, unable to support themselves, or to find anyone who can show them how to write a CV, or tell them who to approach for work, etc. This northern part of Hammersmith and Fulham is one of the poorest and most deprived parts of the borough, as well.

'The other thing is that it's not just Somali people that we help,' Ismail says. 'We get British people ringing us all the time. There are a lot of people who want advice about finding a job, or trying to sort out problems with their children at school. If there were enough public services to help people, they would not need to come to (voluntary) services [sic] like mine, but people don't know where else they can go.'

That seems a fair point: in its April 2007 voluntary sector funding report (downloadable on the link above), the council says there are 'generalist services' that will provide the services that Horn of Africa used to. Point is - where are these 'generalist services?' Who runs them? Where are they? Is there an address for them and a contact number that we can put on this site? What does 'generalist services' even mean?

Ismail says that she and a group of volunteers are trying to keep the centre open, but that she isn't too excited about their chances.

'We could not just let it go after 20 years. We didn't want to lose it. A lot of people we know are giving voluntary help to us. They (the council) terminated the lease on the building, but we went back to the property owner and they gave us some time to fundraise. But I don't have a job now, and I have to look for other work. When I get another job, I will probably have to work fulltime, so you have to be realistic about that.

'The fundraising is very hard as well. They [the Tories] cut our throats, really. Fundraising is even harder for us now, because people know that we lost funding from the local authority. It is very detrimental to be known as an organisation that the local authority [has decided not to support]. That's the reality, even if [the truth is that] it's not your fault, and that everybody [is being hit with cuts].

'No one cares about what happens to the people who come to our centre. They are very vulnerable. They don't have money, or resources. If you're not powerful, you are out. I feel very disappointed as a British person. We're trying to help the people that come to us to find jobs and make their contribution. Of course people want to work. I'm unemployed now, and I want to work. But these people need help with English, and CVs.'

Little wonder, Ismail says, that every loan shark and wide boy in Shepherd's Bush tries to prey on these vulnerable people. They're desperate for jobs, money and somewhere to live, and they'll listen to anybody who seems to be offering those things. But maybe that's the point. Desperate immigrants will do anything for money, and that includes working for subsistence wages on the black market. Suppose if you're a Tory, that makes it even easier to find yourself a cheap cleaner.

Very short story

So... your funding dries up on Monday if you're one of the Hammersmith and Fulham voluntary sector groups that Hammersmith and Fulham Tory Council has targeted for funding cuts.

It's been six months since the council's cabinet voted to direct funding away from longstanding, left-leaning groups like the Hammersmith Community Law Centre and towards less bolshie organisations. (The Tory council claims that it's not cutting funding overall to the voluntary sector, but the Labour group begs to differ: they say funding drops significantly from October (ie Monday) and even more significantly in the 2008 to 2009 year, when projections are for an overall cut of more than 25%).

The legal action taken against the council by three people who've used voluntary sector services in Hammersmith and Fulham came to very little this week. The three aimed to argue that the council hadn't consulted properly about the cuts, or talked with the people who were going to be most affected. This seemed a likely argument - a fair few organisations heard about the proposed cuts to their funding on the grapevine, not through any formal council process.

In April, when the cabinet voted for the cuts, people like Helena Ismail from the Somali support group Horn of Africa, which lost all its funding, said they hadn't received as much as a phone call from the council about it. She found out when the Hammersmith Community Law Centre rang her and told her. The Hammersmith Community Law Centre only found out because one of its lawyers happened to see the council report that recommended the cuts.

Anyway, the judge this week ruled that the application for the hearing about the council's failure to consult with, or even talk to, the affected, was submitted out of time - very cute, says Law Centre Federation Chair John Fitzpatrick, when you remember that the main reason the application was delayed at all (if it was delayed - he still thinks it was within time) was that people gave the council the benefit of the doubt for a bit, and tried to keep talking with councillors and officers, to change their minds. They filed the hearing application when they started to see that talking to Tories wasn't particularly effective.

Fitzgerald hasn't seen the judge's full decision yet , but says it's all politics, anyway. 'I don't put faith in judges.' He couldn't see the court wanting to get involved in overturning poor local authority funding decisions: once they get into that, that's all they'll be doing. He says the voluntary sector won't give up, and will meet next week to decide where to go from here. He isn't sure how the Law Centre will handle its own funding cut of more than £100,000 from Monday. 'We're not looking at compulsory redundancies, but what we have been doing so far is not recruiting for vacancies. We would have to say that the service just will be reduced while this happens. We will have to say that.'

Working on...

...more interviews with Hammersmith Law Centre clients as we speak.

News in the meantime: on 18 June at 7.30pm, Polly Toynbee and others will be taking part in a debate in Hammersmith on the issue of funding in the voluntary sector. The event is being organised by the Hammersmith Law Centre, who, as readers of this site will know, are having 60% of their own funding removed from them by those charming Tories at Hammersmith and Fulham Council.

The debate will be held at the Irish Centre is on Blacks Road, Hammersmith. Twill be a public meeting, all, so get yourselves along.

You can read more about the Hammersmith and Fulham Voluntary Sector Funding Campaign here.

Conservative courage

This story: the Cabinet at Hammersmith and Fulham's Conservative Council meets to accept the Voluntary Sector Funding report which cuts funding to central and longstanding voluntary groups.

Photo: Hammersmith and Fulham Council leader Stephen Greenhalgh.

Introduction and background to the voluntary sector funding controversy at Hammersmith and Fulham

Photos from the protest at the Monday 16 April Cabinet meeting

Splendid scenes at Hammersmith and Fulham Town Hall this week, when several hundred furious locals shouted the council's largely pale and male Tory cabinet members out of the meeting hall, and down towards the Town Hall latrines - the very place (I'm sure I've got this straight) where the H&F Tories first spawned.

The locals had turned up to protest about the council's plans to cut ('prioritise' is the word that the Tories are using at the moment) funding to Hammersmith and Fulham's voluntary sector.

Groups that work very closely with some of Hammersmith and Fulham's poorest communities have lost all their funding, and they are not thrilled. The Hammersmith and Fulham Law Centre - a group of 12 experienced and committed lawyers that has been the legal brain of the Hammersmith voluntary sector together for nearly 30 years, and so often successfully highlighted council and government uselessness - has lost 60% of its funding.

The really interesting part at this point is that the length of time it has taken the council to get around to telling people that their funding and jobs have gone. Any number of attendees at this week's cabinet meeting accused the council of failing to let them know that a) they were due for the scrapheap and b) that they had a right to bring a group to the cabinet meeting to voice concerns that they had about being thus discarded. One council officer tried to tell the meeting that the council had sent all voluntary groups a letter which touched on the latest developments and gave a web address for the report that explained where the axe was due to fall. Alas for this officer, the muttered chorus of 'no, no, no,' that round the hall suggested that doubts continue around this one. She said something else, but nobody could hear it. Probably best.

There wasn't much love flowing the way of the people's press from the council, either. We don't like to make a habit of autobiography here, but we do it when it brings an instructive dimension to the landscape. To cut a fairly short story shorter, the bumholes on the door tried to chuck citizen reporters such as ourselves out. We were forced to participate in a weird preliminary round with a couple of flunkies from Hammersmith and Fulham security, who started to panic about the size of the mob and the people who were photographing it. Of course, everybody was photographing it, because everybody in the world has a mobile phone with a camera on it, or a camera, or a couple of both, but that didn't stop security trying to chuck us out and confiscate our stuff.

'You have to take those cameras down to reception,' a lead security person called Kevin bustled over to bawl at us. We'd taken a few hundred photos of the whole event by this point, so Kevin's initiative seemed to come a bit late in the picture, but he was getting some sort of recently-assembled policy direction through his earpiece. Or whatever. Anyway, we told him to piss off.

'You can't have those cameras in here! You have to take them out!' Kevin yelled at us.

'Why!'we yelled at Kevin.

'The councillors are very sensitive about having their photos taken!' he yelled. (You will have already enjoyed a picture of council leader Stephen Greenhalgh at the top of this story. You can decide whether he ought to be sensitive about being seen for yourselves). But anyway - bugger Kevin. We kept our cameras with us. A staff member who knew us spoke up on our behalf at this point, too, so Kevin abandoned the camera argument and took the staff member out in the corridor to scream at her.

And hell - maybe Mr Greenhalgh is a sensitive guy. Certainly, he appeared very sensitive about telling a public meeting full of politicised black people why he was cutting their community organisations loose. 'All our funding decisions are all measured against the administration's priorities...' he blethered, eyeing the exits very closely. Assistant Chief Executive Lesley Courcouf, meanwhile, had been detailed off to tell Kevin and his guys to upgrade to a code yellow, or whatever. It was pretty clear that the cabinet was going to vote to accept the Voluntary Funding report's recommendations, and do a runner, and probably not in that order.

Councillor Anthony Lillis, who is the cabinet member for community and children's services and the architect of the whole voluntary funding disaster, was meanwhile trying to calm to hordes with a buttload of garbage re: the reasons why he hadn't bothered to talk to the voluntary groups that were about to lose all their money. He said that if he'd spoken to one organisation, then he would have had to speak to them all, That being the case, he'd decided to speak to nobody. Or something to that effect - alas, the finer points of this address were lost on account of crowd abuse.

The cabinet did the runner at about half-eight. Helena Ismail, co-ordinator of the longstanding West London immigrant support group Horn of Africa (one of the groups that has had all its funding cut by the Tories), got up and tried to speak to the cabinet, even though she wasn't on the official deputations list. Security tried to make her sit down. She got up again. So did everybody in the hall. 'Let her speak! Let her speak!' everyone in the place started to shriek. The cabinet got up and scrammed at that point, citing some rot about public disobedience. Word is that they took the final vote in the second-floor gents.

Conclusions thus far:

David Cameron won't control the Conservatives at Hammersmith and Fulham.
David Cameron can't control the Conservatives at Hammersmith and Fulham.

Annoying government

This isn't the first time that the law centre has found itself threatened with closure. This article continues interviews with people who are interested to know why the law centre is in the firing line again.

There are links to the first reports on the Hammersmith Law Centre and voluntary sector funding cuts issue at Hammersmith and Fulham at the end of this story.

Photo: Sheona York

There are certainly days when founding Hammersmith Law Centre lawyer and Law Centres Federation Chair John Fitzpatrick wonders if the centre's famed habit of confronting political nobilities led to Hammersmith and Fulham council whacking £120,000 from the centre's grant this year.

Fitzgerald, who sits on the centre's management committee and teaches at the University of Kent, isn't particularly keen to gratify anybody's thundering paranoia: on the other hand, he feels that a number of the centre's recent cases may have lost it points with whoever it is out there who keeps tabs on prospective troublemakers.

Chief among these cases was the recent and much-publicised court case of the group of nine Afghan men who hijacked a plane in 2000, and held more than 150 crew and passengers hostage in an airport standoff that went on for some days. The men argued that they took this extreme action because they had no choice and wanted to escape the Taliban. They were jailed, but freed on appeal.

It was somewhere around here that things got very difficult: the law said the men should be allowed to stay in the UK, but the public, and certainly political, view was nothing of the kind. An Immigration Appeal Tribunal ruled that the men should be granted leave to stay in the UK on human rights grounds, because they were deemed to pose no further threat to the UK, and faced real danger if they were returned to Afghanistan. It was a controversial finding in the political sense, to say the very least. Successive home secretaries have put a great deal of effort into challenging the ruling, and into questioning the right of the nine men to the discretionary leave that would allow them to work in the UK. Many members of the press and public were behind them, too: observing the human rights of hijackers was, for many people, a bridge too far.

The Hammersmith law centre represented the nine men as they went through the courts. It also represented the men when home secretary John Reid made that office's most recent attempt to impose temporary leave status on the men - a status that would have deprived those men of the right to work and left them as a burden on the state. The centre took the case on, Fitzpatrick says, because it believed – like the court of appeal and everyone else who has since ruled on the initial ruling – that the judiciary made the correct decision as far as the law went, and that the home office must observe judicial decisions, like everybody else has to. It wasn't about standing up for plane hijacking, Fitzgerald says, casting a skyward glance - it was a matter of defending the legal process, which had consistently found in favour of humanitarian protection for the hijackers and so must be observed.

The court of appeal chucked Reid's appeal out, and censured the home office besides. As well it should have, Fitzpatrick says: the home office had no business ignoring the tribunal's first findings. 'Yes, [those men] hijacked an airplane in Afghanistan, and they were put on trial and convicted of a criminal offence, [but] there was an appeal and they were successful, and the decision at that time by the immigration appeal tribunal was that they ought to be given indefinite leave to remain in this country [on human rights grounds]. And the home office refused to accept the tribunal's findings. It was a stunning rejection of a decision of a court. It was a case of real constitutional importance. '

It was also a case where politicians went after lawyers and the courts in public, and described the law and various courts as an ass: Jack Straw, David Blunkett and even Tony Blair took the unusual step of publicly criticising the judiciary for its findings, even as the judiciary was praised elsewhere for delivering a factual legal interpretation. Unfortunately, Fitzpatrick says, there can be serious fallout when you fight a popular tide in a defence of process. Since the hijackers' case, Fitzpatrick says, he has been aware of 'mutterings that the law centre acted for terrorists, you know... yes, we fear that they took that into account [when the recent decision to cut law centre funding was made].'

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History

It wouldn't exactly have been the first time there'd been mutterings about the Hammersmith law centre in backrooms of influence. The law centre, to its endless credit, has been winding persons of clout up for years.

Which is hardly surprising when you consider the point of the whole law centre exercise. The centres – there's about 60 across the UK at the moment - were set up 30 or so years ago by community-minded individuals who were keen to set up free legal advice centres to communities that nobody else much cared about. It followed that lawyers who found the concept attractive tended towards politics of a collective inclination – always a surefire way of drawing establishment lightening.

The Hammersmith law centre was set up in 1979 and was funded by a five-year Urban Aid grant. It was staffed by six people who were keen to see where the community law centre concept might go. Fitzpatrick was one of those six staff members. Sheona York - a feminist, activist and public-sector worker who since qualified as a solicitor and still works at the centre - was another.

York had been working in the civil service, but had become disillusioned - 'you were providing research for people [government ministers] who you felt didn't really want to hear it.' A community law centre, by stark contrast, gave a politically-interested young activist a chance to work closely with communities affected by the aforementioned government policy.

The idea of neighbourhood law centres began in the United States, on the back of Lyndon Johnson's Anti-Poverty Act - 'they were area and community-based initiatives,' York says, 'kind of the flavour of the time. [Our idea] was to do work that there either wasn't legal aid for, or that legal aid didn't quite fit the bill for. [We were working in] the area of legal problems that most affected the community.' Those problems included 'a huge proportion [of cases around] private-sector housing - repossession and eviction and that sort of thing. We were also representing young people who had been picked up by the police, and also parents whose children were being taken into care.'

All of which, Fitzpatrick says, made the law centres attractive. 'It was very much a grassroots movement. I was qualifying as a lawyer then and I thought, 'that's the sort of legal practice I want. The North Kensington law centre was the first [to launch] in the 1970s, and then they began to spread out - Paddington, Brent, Lambeth and so on. [There were a lot of people] who were concerned to give access to the law to people who didn't have it. Any socially-aware lawyer, or politically-aware lawyer was attracted by the thought of using their professional skills in a way that complemented their political outlook. I don't think people in law centres thought [the centres] were going to change the world, but they thought that they might improve it while they were changing the world politically. It was very much a case of working with, rather than for, people, and taking a partisan approach.'

The ground for the centres was as fertile as it had been: communities then, York says, had 'real organisation' in the form of bolshie tenants' associations, women's groups and other grassroots organisations that had genuine experience of collective power. 'There were people in those organisations who had real political aspirations, and it wasn't a foreign idea to people to think of getting together and achieving something. Say, for example, if they [a tenants' association] heard of some person suffering abuse, they would go around the perpertrator's house and just stand on the doorstep with their arms folded and tell [the perpertrator] to stop it. People would take a thing like that to the tenants' association and expect them to deal with it. They didn't want to call the police and have the police on the estate, and then have young people on the estate picked up.'

So, the law centres acted for people in disadvantaged communities. They also began to side with them. 'That sort of [sympathy for grassroots issues] was very important,' Fitzpatrick says. '[When you're working with the community], it's not just providing a legal service, but being on the side of people that you're providing a legal service for. The whole point is that the centres were participatory, pluralistic and partisan. They were managed by people who were elected and accountable. A lot of people on the (law centre's) management committee were ex-clients. It was about making sure that people had input into the direction of the service, so that you knew where the problems are and what needed addressing.'

None of which tends to thrill the authorities.

More to come soon.

Introduction to Hammersmith and Fulham voluntary sector cuts story
Report from first protest at deciding Hammersmith and Fulham cabinet meeting
New Statesman report link on Hammersmith and Fulham Tory Council
Photos from protests against Hammersmith and Fulham voluntary sector funding cuts

Hammersmith and Fulham Tory watch

Hangbitch New Statesman watch on the Hammersmith and Fulham Tories

Respecting the law

This is the latest article in a series about Hammersmith and Fulham Council's cutting of funding to voluntary sector organisations, and its targeting in particular of the Hammersmith and Fulham Law Centre, which is about to lose 60% of its funding.

There are links to the earlier articles in this series at the end of this story. There are also links to the Conservative blogs that have been discussing this issue and these posts.

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Community law centres aren't always popular with the national and local politicians that fund them, but surely that's par for the course?

Law centres were set up to provide free legal advice to people who couldn't afford to pay for legal help and representation. Often, these people are users of public services like immigration services, council housing, and welfare. And there are, unfortunately, times when these people are not given the right advice about their immigration, housing and welfare entitlements.

The truth is that government agencies and councils are as capable of cocking up as the rest of us, and on an awesome scale when they really give it a go. They wrongly deny people their entitlements to housing benefits, or at work, or they don't act on complaints with quite the vigour you'd hope.

And who can blame them for these shambles? Times ain't exactly high in the public-sector trenches. Frontline staff - people who know as much as anyone about the ways that complex benefits systems work and combine - are being culled at a majestic rate. God only knows what is happening at the Home Office. Councils are a riot – they are enormous organisations that are always trying to deal with a mass of ever-changing policy, legislation and performance targets. They're losing front-end staff at breakneck pace. The Tories at Hammersmith and Fulham are as guilty as the next administration in this respect: the list of service cuts they propose at the council is being recorded and discussed so extensively online that you can drive yourself bananas trying to decide who to link to on it.

Simple logic tells you that mistakes are bound to happen when expert frontline officers are chucked out of a complex organisation. Simple logic also tells you that community law centres that help vulnerable citizens are needed more than ever when right-wing loopies take over the local council and start hacking away at much-needed public services.

The statistics will tell you plenty as well: Legal services research surveys show that one in three people experience at least one civil justice problem over a three-year period, and that there are likely to be more than a million unsolved legal problems every year, and that people who are vulnerable to social exclusion – a group that seems likely to expand when ye Tories come bollocking into town – experience the most legal problems.

And those are just some of the reasons why Hammersmith and Fulham Council is, as Law Centres Federation Chair John Fitzpatrick says, crazy to cut law centres loose. Far from ridding themselves of lawyers who sue them (the Hammersmith and Fulham Tories have tried to criticise the law centre for taking cases against the council without explaining, as we helpfully have above, the reasons why cases sometimes need to be taken against councils), the council will destroy a relationship that has largely been advantageous to the council, the law centre, and the community, in equal parts.

'That's why this cut is irrational,' Fitzpatrick says. 'We liase closely with the council over problems. We always make the point to the council that it is in their interests to be sure [of the decisions that they have made, to stop them going further into the court system], and to have an independent verification of their decisions. Of course it's in their interests to have the reassurance of an auditor - it's a tremendous feedback mechanism for them to have something outside the beast itself, looking at how things work. It's part of any local authority's duty to residents, to be sure that people have access to the advice that they need – the kind of advice that is simply not going to be provided by conventional legal providers.'

The Law Centres Federation produced a detailed paper in 2005 that described how independent community law centres can make those helpful contributions for government departments and local councils. You don't need to be too bright to see, for instance, that providing good benefits advice would help the Pensions Service meet its targets for paying pensions credits, or that helping a council resolve an employment dispute locally would save the council having to pay to settle at a tribunal. Helping people solve their immigration and housing problems puts them in a much better position to settle into their communities and find jobs. A few words of legal advice to council officers over the phone can save the council endless headaches on age discrimination legislation, disability discrimination, the homelessness act, the human rights act – you name it.

'It's why [the law centre] is so valuable for [the council] themselves.' Fitzpatrick says councillors have long recognised the integral role law centres play in the community and for the council – 'councillors sit on the [law centre] management committee.' He says the irony of the conflict now is that 'Hammersmith had very good [local] partnerships. There were law centres, advice centres, the local authority, and the legal services commission [working together]. It's been phenomenal value.'

Of course there is controversy - that is, as has already been observed in this article, always going to be par for the course when you are prepared to represent people who aren't popular with politicians, and/or some member of the public. The facts are that this is still a democracy and even the most offensive offenders remain entitled to representation. You don't have to be a pinko to believe that, either. You simply have to believe that everyone's innocent until proven otherwise, and that everyone is entitled to a hearing.

Fitzpatrick has already spoken about the problems that he believes the law centre's representation of the nine Afghan hijackers may have caused the centre: certainly, some right-wing bloggers have tried to claim the the law centre's courage in taking that case ought to be held against it.

There have been plenty of other examples – Fitzpatrick talks about another 'more recently, which was a case of an Afghan boy who came here as an unaccompanied minor. He spent a couple of years living here, and he didn't want to go back home when he came of age. One of his parents was killed by the Taliban, because he [the boy's father] was a communist. The boy didn't want to go back. He said 'I'm marked now as a member of the same family. I'm scared to go back.'

'That case went to the High Court. A newspaper article was obtained from Kabul and this article mentioned that the young man was still of interest to the authorities in Afghanistan. The authorities here didn't want to consider that article as new evidence, but the High Court agreed that the article should be looked at as new evidence as part of this young man's application to stay.' The point that the Tories need to grasp is that plenty of potential voters are human enough to understand that there are good lawyers who are prepared to take on unpopular defendants, because they believe that those defendants are entitled to representation. They also know a Tory slur when they see one.

Starting-point for this site's articles on voluntary sector funding cuts at Hammersmith and Fulham Council
Photos from protests at Hammersmith and Fulham Town Hall
Conservative councillor Paul Bristow's blog on the vountary sector debate at H&F
Conservative Hammersmith and Fulham blog on the voluntary sector debate

Hammersmith and Fulham Council website

Hammersmith and Fulham at law

More on Hammersmith and Fulham Tory Council's controversial funding cuts to the Hammersmith voluntary sector:

Here's a useful one: three people who've been helped by the Hammersmith voluntary sector over the years take Hammersmith and Fulham's Tory Council to court this week. The three aim to prove that the council's greatly unpopular plans to cut funding to the voluntary sector are unlawful.

They will argue that the council failed to carry out proper consultation and discussion on the cuts (seems a fair point - those who were present at the council's latest, and most memorable, public voluntary-sector funding question-and-answer session will remember that the council's cabinet ran away and hid in another room when the questions from the floor started to get hairy) and that the council’s decision to reduce the priority given to immigration advice breaches its duties under the Race Relations Act.

The Hammersmith and Fulham Community Law Centre will lose 60% of its funding when the cuts are made next month. The Law Centre only found out about this when one of its solicitors happened across a report in a council agenda that recommended the cuts. Many other voluntary groups only found out they were for the chop when the Law Centre told them that their organisations were on the hit-list in the aforementioned report. It wasn't the best. It seems fair to say that consultation - or indeed, discussion of any kind - is not a strength of Hammersmith and Fulham Tories. Be interesting to see if the judiciary feels the same way.

The case against the council will be heard this week, on Wednesday 26 September. The three complainants are pretty lucky it's being heard at all, says Law Centres Federation Chair John Fitzpatrick - the judge who first received the request for the hearing chucked it out on the grounds that it hadn't been filed quickly enough. Reason prevailed on reapplication, though, and the case will be heard. 'The most that can happen is that the courts will agree that the council didn't consult properly the first time around, and that they need to carry out a race equality impact assessment.' Fitzpatrick says. 'They could make the council go through the whole decision process again, and that could be useful. They would have to ask people in Hammersmith what they thought of cutting this much funding to the voluntary sector.'

Wonder what people would say?

Hammersmith law

The Hammersmith Law Centre is due to lose 60% of its funding in cuts voted for by the Tory Hammersmith and Fulham Council. Thousands of poorer people in the borough will lose access to the free legal advice, support and representation that the centre has provided for nearly 30 years.

All stories and interviews so far on this topic are listed in the menu to the right.

This site is now adding interviews with people who have gone to the law centre for legal help and advice over the years.

Below, Hammersmith law centre clients Vanildo and Claudia Fernandas explain why they sought help from the law centre. They took advice from the law centre this year about emergency housing and benefits.

Vanildo Fernandas was waiting for a bus on Fulham Palace Road very late one night last October when two men walked over and attacked him with a couple of knives. 'Maybe for a robbery,' Vanildo's wife Claudia says. 'I don't know what they did it for. He was waiting by himself for the bus. There was one Iranian guy and one Afghan guy.'

Vanildo, 29, had just finished a night-shift in the restaurant kitchen he'd been working in for about a fortnight. 'When he finished the night, he called me to say that he would be home in about 30 minutes,' Claudia says. Needless to say, he wasn't. 'They cut him everywhere – here, on his throat (they cut his oesophagus open), on his arms, and down his chest. There is nerve problems in his arms now. He has to also have food and drink through a tube in his stomach [because the cut to his oesophagus is still open]. It is [going to take a long time] for him to heal. He is frightened, very difficult. I worry about leaving him alone. There is, um, how do you say it, his imagination?'

Claudia is 37 and from Brasil. Vanildo has Italian and Brasilian citizenship. Claudia first came to England in 2000, as a student. She met Vanildo in England. 'Then, I wanted to go back to Brasil to see my family, and he came to Brasil when I went and asked me if I would marry him. We got married there, in Brasil.'

They returned to England in September last year. 'I like this place. I want to improve my English. When [my English] gets better, I can get a better job. I work in a pharmacy in Hammersmith for six days a week – all day Saturday. I am an assistant pharmacist. I also did, I also have, a course for travel agents course in Brasil. I would like to work as a travel agent. That's why I would like my English to be better.' In Brasil, she taught Portuguese.

Vanildo wants to improve his English, and find a job in IT when his health improves. 'The healing, the healing for him, will take a long time,' Claudia says. Vanildo had been just a few weeks in England, and working for about a fortnight, when he was attacked by the guys with the knives. He spent the six months after that in hospital.

'I had to keep working when he was in hospital,' Claudia says. Meeting their housing costs on her single income was the problem by this point. 'I went to stay with a friend, which was very good. They were very helpful to me, but they did not have room for Vanildo when he was [due to] get out of hospital. My English isn't very good and it was hard to deal with, you know, the legal [jargon] and all this paperwork. I wanted support. The housing benefits woman… grrrrr. I did not understand. I did not understand why I could not get help. They would not help me.'

'The people at the courts told me that they could not help me, but they told me to talk to the law centre. They [the law centre] helped very quickly, [in] one or two weeks. They fixed [the problem with] the housing benefits and the CAB (Citizens' Advice Bureaux) fixed the housing. We are living in temporary accommodation now. It costs me £26 a week. It's a nice place, a good place. Now, Vanildo will get £60 week in Disability Living Allowance now. We found this out this morning and that will start next month. That will help us.'