Who are we? 

The Law Centres Network is the membership body for Law Centres and serves as their collective national voice. Law Centres across the country provide vital legal services to their communities in order to defend the legal rights of local people. Every day, Law Centres help people to save their homes, keep their jobs and protect their loved ones.

We are mounting a legal challenge against the Ministry of Justice (MoJ) for planned changes that will destroy the in-person, emergency support Law Centres are able to provide vulnerable people threatened with eviction.

We have been granted permission to proceed with a Judicial Review of the proposed MoJ changes. We need your support to ensure that the proposed changes by the MoJ do not devastate a successful service that prevents homelessness every day. Please contribute and share this page now!

Case background

Five years ago, cuts to civil legal aid have decimated funding for social welfare law, and Law Centres have born the brunt of these cuts. We have put up with these changes despite Law Centre closures. We expected that, when the damage to remaining legal aid became apparent, government would seek to repair it. This would ensure that legal aid runs more effectively and meaningfully upholds legal rights and protections for vulnerable people.

Instead, planned changes now threaten remaining in-person support which Law Centres and others offer vulnerable people threatened with eviction.  We need to stand up and say, ENOUGH IS ENOUGH!

The housing possession court duty scheme (HPCDS) offers on-the-day face-to-face advice and advocacy at court to people facing possession proceedings.

Anyone in danger of eviction or having their property repossessed can get free legal advice and representation on the day of the hearing, regardless of their financial circumstances.

It is already an effective and timely intervention.

However, against the advice of people delivering the duty scheme, MoJ has decided to make two significant and untested changes to it:

• To consolidate the number of court duty schemes in order to provide 'larger and more sustainable' contracts despite 48 out of 59 consultation respondents disagreeing with the proposal. This would mean that less than a third of current schemes will remain; each will serve a much larger area, so people at risk of eviction would need to travel much farther and at great expense to get help to defend their homes

• To introduce price-competitive tendering despite 51 out of 59 objections. This would mean that instead of setting the fee for legal aid work, as government does elsewhere, providers have had to bid against one another. The Law Society has warned that is a race to the bottom, which risks affecting the quality of the service and its viability

We believe that these planned changes are a cut too far, and we are not alone. 

Help us by adding your support to this legal challenge, so we preserve this vital lifeline for the tens of thousands who need it every year.

"'Attending the court duty schemes is important for law centres to advise vulnerable people at a time of real need. These are people who, by nature, do not seek help. This is why they end up in court facing eviction. The new contracting model therefore has a significant impact on access to justice and needs to be challenged.'." - Julie Bishop, Director of the Law Centres Network