Thirty per cent of legal aid lawyers at risk of redundancy

Nearly one in three civil legal aid lawyers consider themselves at risk of redundancy, according to a survey on the effect of the legal aid reforms on the profession.

Just under 30 per cent said they were at risk of redundancy, with those working in housing, debt and welfare benefits being most affected by the cuts to legal aid, which started coming into force this week.

Carried out jointly by Warwick University's Centre for Human Rights in Practice and social justice forum iLegal, the survey canvassed 674 law professionals working in legal aid.

The survey, believed to be the first on this scale, elicited responses from the whole civil legal aid spectrum: citizens advice bureaux (35.7 per cent) and law firms (34.5 per cent), as well as charities, law centres and law clinics.

It also highlighted geographical differences in the impact of the changes, introduced in the Legal Aid Sentencing and Punishment of Offenders Act (LASPO), across the country.

"Legal advice services are most heavily concentrated in London and the South East of England but it is the rest of the UK that will be disproportionately affected by reductions in legal aid services," said Natalie Byrom (pictured), the university's lead researcher on the project and a PhD student.

A quarter of respondents (24 per cent) said their organisation was likely to stop providing the service in the next two years, more than half of whom were from the North of England.

In contrast, only one in five respondents in the South East (19.4 per cent) said their agency would stop providing specialist casework as a result of the cuts.

According to the survey, the most qualified advisers were most at risk of redundancy, with 63.4 per cent being specialist advisers and 44.8 per cent having more than ten years' experience.

Providers said they were considering a number of solutions to address the challenge posed by the withdrawal of legal aid. These include cutting down overheads, applying to the Advice Transition Fund - which is administered by the Big Lottery Fund - and running grant-funded projects.

Applying for external funding can offer temporary respite but providers are usually expected to use the fund to develop new business models.

“The Advice Transition Fund offers grants between £50,000 and £350,000 to partnerships in the not-for-profit sector, but the money cannot be used to fund frontline service delivery,” Byrom said. “The stated aim is to make NfP more business savvy and reduce duplication in the sector.”

“The fund is meant to help these organisations ‘transform and adapt to a new funding environment’ and ‘develop new delivery channels’, and they must be able to demonstrate they are achieving these objectives, but finding the time needed to document this can be difficult when you spend your time advising,” she said.

The survey said a "significant number" of respondents working in advice centres and citizens advice bureaux reported their agencies would be charging for advice.

"These findings are indicative of the precarious state of the whole legal aid advice sector in this country at the moment," said iLegal co-founder Patrick Tornsey.

The survey results are being compiled into a report due for publication next week on the iLegal website.