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