Hammersmith Community Law Centre

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?