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The Legal Services Commission (LSC) has started advising legal aid providers whether or not they have been successful in their bids for civil legal aid contracts to commence in April this year. The contracts are being awarded for work in cases which remain in scope after the cuts in legal aid are enforced by the government.
Legal aid providers who applied for contracts in family, housing and debt, as well as immigration and asylum law, will be informed about the outcomes of their bids by Friday 11 January. Applicants for housing possession court schemes will be the last to be notified. The LSC reports that there have been many more applicants for contracts than the number of current suppliers. LAG believes that this will likely lead to the total number of cases that suppliers are permitted to take on, known as matter starts, being spread too thinly to be viable for many firms and other legal aid providers. In housing law, for example, the number of bidders was 828, against the current number of suppliers at 533. A total of 51,889 matter starts are available for housing cases, but requests from bidders totalled 146,820 matter starts, a shortfall of 94,931.
Many suppliers will only be allocated what the LSC refers to as 'the guaranteed volume of work', which amounts to 61 matter starts in family and 100 in housing and debt, and immigration and asylum contracts. In the family category, for example, the LSC reports that in most London boroughs suppliers have only been granted this minimum number of matter starts. It also warns that such is the demand for contracts in many areas, that even if some suppliers decide not to proceed with contracts or are eliminated in the verification procedure (the next stage of the application process), it will not be able to allocate any more matter starts. The LSC says that a total of 38 areas are oversubscribed for housing and debt work. Manchester, Neath Port Talbot and Swansea, and Durham are among the 21 areas in which such has been the demand for contracts, even if suppliers drop out, no further matter starts will be re-allocated.
Carol Storer, director of the Legal Aid Practitioners Group, told LAG that she fears that 'with a large number of practitioners only being allocated the minimum number of matter starts, it will not be viable for many of them to continue in legal aid work'. She thinks the 'wide spread of the available matter starts will particularly hit the larger practices' as they will not have enough matter starts to justify retaining their current staff.
LAG believes that the issue of how widely to distribute the available legal aid work is very much a case of 'damned if they do and damned if they don’t' for the LSC. Concentrating the work among fewer firms and other providers would have led to accusations of lack of client choice and cutting access to justice, as fewer providers usually means more geographic gaps in supply. It could be argued that it would have been better to concentrate legal aid among fewer, better quality providers. However, this would have meant the LSC having to set higher quality standards to measure suppliers against, which is a much more difficult procurement process to get right.
Follow this link to the LSC website for further details: www.justice.gov.uk/legal-aid/contracts-and-tenders/tenders/face-to-face-tenders-for-2013-contracts.