Jon Robins questions the mandatory telephone gateway
The idea of a NHS Direct-style advice line extending access to justice to the poor and vulnerable would indeed be a wonderful thing. That helpline is being dismantled and a legal equivalent isn’t going to happen anytime soon, but telephone advice does loom large in this new post-LASPO world and we now have a “mandatory telephone gateway” in place for advice relating to debt, discrimination and special educational needs.
Single point of entry
The idea as set out in the Green Paper that preceded LASPO was for a single point of entry through a telephone helpline to what remains of a decimated, post-cuts legal aid scheme. As I have argued before, the concern is that the “gateway” becomes one more obstacle that needs to be surmounted for those in need of help and advice.
Such is the frenetic pace of reform in the world of publicly-funded law, that it’s not difficult to miss out on the detail and, as we know, the devil is in the detail. So in the Legal Aid Agency’s first business
