Lost in space? the role of place in the delivery of social welfare law advice over the telephone and face-to-face

ABSTRACT

Advice that is provided exclusively over the telephone has been promoted by government as more convenient and accessible than face-to-face appointments. The resulting push towards telephone-only provision, as implemented by the Legal Aid, Sentencing and Punishment of Offenders Act 2012, challenges the long history of association between social welfare law advice and local delivery within disadvantaged communities. This article reports on qualitative research comparing telephone and face-to-face advice which uncovers the continuing relevance of place in the dynamics and mechanics of social welfare law provision. Familiarity with the geographical location, knowledge of local policies and procedures, relationships with opponents and allies, and an understanding of the ‘local legal culture’ mean that face-to-face advisers are often able to conduct their legal casework more effectively. Conversely, local knowledge is unlikely to be available to Community Legal Advice telephone advisers. This research suggests that, in addition, telephone-only advisers may be developing a more narrow understanding of the essential qualities of casework. These findings are particularly significant in view of the likely future expansion of remote methods of delivery in legal aid work.

KEYWORDS:

• Place
• local
• telephone advice
• access to justice
• legal aid
• Law Centres
• housing cases
• methods of delivery

Acknowledgments

This work was supported by the ESRC under a LSE Doctoral Training Studentship from 2011/12 – 2013/14; and by the LSE under a LSE Research Studentship in 2014/15.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. Under LASPO, telephone-only advice became mandatory in education, discrimination and debt. The Post-Implementation Review (PIR) of LASPO reports a reduction of £60m in legal aid expenditure between 2012–13 and 2017–18 in the areas of housing, debt, welfare benefits and employment (MOJ, 2019).

2. See, for example, the Government Transformation Strategy (Cabinet Office and Government Digital Service 2017).

3. In 2014, for instance, HMRC closed all of its 281 local face-to-face enquiry centres to be replaced by a telephone service (which it was said could arrange home visits in appropriate cases) (HMRC, 2013).

4. In 2013–2014, there were 52,981 legal help cases in the areas of discrimination, education, housing, debt and welfare benefits. In addition there were 11 telephone providers and 677 providers with face-to-face contracts in these categories (Legal Aid Agency (LAA), 2014).

5. For the purposes of this paper, vulnerability refers to physical, mental or social characteristics which make it more difficult for individuals to manage their day-to-day affairs and which mean that they find it harder to cope when faced with problems.

6. Five lawyers and 18 advisers participated in this research, so in the analysis of the data, the term ‘adviser’ is used generically to describe the legal personnel in this study. Please note, however, the key to direct quotes from interviewees: ‘FA’ denotes a face-to-face adviser, ‘FL’ is a face-to-face lawyer (i.e. legally qualified), ‘TA’ is a telephone adviser, ‘FC’ is a face-to-face client and ‘TC’ is a telephone client.

7. My PhD thesis includes a full discussion of these issues (Burton, 2015).

8. New research by the Law Society (2019) has, for example, revealed that over half of all local authorities in England and Wales have no provision for housing legal aid services, leaving 37% of the population living in local authorities without a housing legal aid provider.

9. ‘On more than one occasion, a law centre which has taken action against the local council has found its grant from the council suddenly at risk’ (Harlow and Rawlings 1992, p. 119).

10. Under existing funding arrangements, CLA telephone advisers cannot provide clients with court representation. They can make written representations on the client’s behalf.

11. A randomised trial in the US comparing outcomes in summary eviction matters found that clients who were given both self-help ‘how-to’ sessions and traditional attorney-client representation had significantly better outcomes than those clients who only received the ‘how-to’ sessions (Greiner et al. 2013).

12. In more recent work, Susskind and Susskind (2015) recognise the need for tacit knowledge but are less clear about how it will be reproduced electronically.