How can we solve the funding crisis within the legal not-for-profit sector, asks Jon Robins
Some 45 years after North Kensington Law Centre opened for business in a former butchers shop at the top end of Portobello Road, the 43-member strong movement is presently suffering “a mid-life crisis”. As the Law Centres Network (LCN) put it in their latest annual last month, it was “not so much a crisis of vision, but a crisis of funding”.
LASPO cuts
The brutal cuts under the Legal Aid, Sentencing and Punishment of Offenders Act 2012 (LASPO) removed most of social welfare law from the legal aid scheme and, in doing so, threatened the future of the most radical attempt to redefine the delivery of legal services.
As Michael Zander QC, emeritus professor of LSE who was at North Kensington for its opening ceremony, explained back in 1978: “Nothing less than the introduction of a new public service to operate, alongside and in supplement to the private profession, would suffice to deal adequately with the problem of providing proper legal services to a section of the public who went
