The Legal Services Commission (LSC) advised legal aid providers last month whether or not they had been successful in their bids for civil contracts, which will start in April 2013. The contracts are for work in cases that will remain in scope after the legal aid cuts introduced by the Legal Aid, Sentencing and Punishment of Offenders Act 2012.

The LSC reports that there have been many more bidders for contracts than the number of current suppliers. In housing law, for example, the number of bidders was 828 compared with the 533 current suppliers. A total of 51,889 matter starts were available and there were bids for 146,820 matter starts. Many bidders will only be allocated what the LSC refers to as the ‘guaranteed volume of work’, which amounts to 61 matter starts in family contracts, and 100 matter starts respectively in housing and debt contracts, and in 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. The LSC also warns that, in many areas, such is the demand for contracts 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 allocate more matter starts. The commission reports that a total of 38 areas are oversubscribed for housing and debt work. Of these, there are 21 regions, which include Manchester, Neath Port Talbot, Swansea and Durham, where the demand for contracts was such that even if suppliers drop out, no further matter starts will be reallocated as the LSC is anticipating that there will still be too many suppliers in these areas.

Some practitioner groups fear that this is likely to lead to the number of matter starts being spread too thinly for legal aid work to be viable for many firms and other legal aid providers. Carol Storer, director of the Legal Aid Practitioners Group, told LAG 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 believes that 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. Alison Harvey, general secretary of the Immigration Law Practitioners’ Association, told LAG that, in most areas of the country, providers have only been granted a maximum of 100 matter starts which, she argues, ‘is too small for a firm to be viable unless the firm does only the most complex cases and/or a high proportion of higher court work, or a substantial amount of private work or those in the firm practising in immigration also practice in other areas of law’. Alison Harvey fears that many good-quality providers will be discouraged from covering asylum work and that the standard of work might fall. She warns that this could lead to the Legal Aid Agency, which will replace the LSC and administer legal aid from April 2013, ‘having less confidence in its suppliers, which raises the prospect of yet more micromanagement and lack of trust’.