Legal aid cuts lead to collapse of legal services charity

Finance | Kirsty Weakley | 22 Aug 2011

Law For All, one of the UK’s largest providers of not-for-profit legal advice, has gone into administration as a result of cuts to the legal aid budget.

The charity was founded in 1994 and at its height had 15,000 legal aid clients per year in London, Cambridgeshire, Northamptonshire and Staffordshire.

A statement on its website confirms the appointment of administrators Anthony Batty and Company LLP and says that, “an unsustainable administrative burden” and “an increasingly complicated funding mechanism” as well as government plans to cut legal aid payments by 10 per cent this autumn, led to the decision.

The administrators have kept on some staff to deal with open cases, and the Legal Services Commission (LSC) is in the process of transferring cases to other providers.

Law For All received the majority of its funding from a contract with the Legal Services Commission which for the financial year ending March 2010 totalled more than £2m. The charity also had a contract to provide legal services across the London Borough of Ealing.

An LSC spokesperson said: “It was Law For All's trustees who took the decision to go into administration. Since that happened, the LSC has been working with the insolvency practitioners to ensure that Law For All's clients continue to get the help they need.”

A Charity Commission spokesman said: "We have been informed by the administrators of Law For All (registered charity no. 1030476) that the charity has been put into administration and expect to be kept informed of any further developments."

Bob Nightingale, chief executive of the London Legal Support Trust warned that many other providers were facing similar difficulties and that when the cut to legal aid is introduced in October, “half of them will probably go after that”.

In November 2010 the ministry of justice unveiled plans to reduce legal aid by £350m per year by 2015.

The Legal Aid, Sentencing and Punishment of Offenders Bill was introduced to Parliament on 21 June 2011 and revealed plans to end legal aid for private family law cases, clinical negligence claims, employment and education law, some aspects of immigration law and some debt, housing and benefit issues.

Directory: Charity Commission

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