Legal aid in many countries means the provision of legal assistance through a variety of means (voluntary work, grant-aided or charitable legal-service bodies, pro bone) to the poor. In Brita in the term legal add is used more specifically to mean the provision of legal advice, assistance and representation through the legal aid scheme, which was first established by Parliament in 1949 and is now governed by the Legal Aid Act 1988.

Under the scheme those who fall within the prescribed limits of income and capital obtain the services of solicitors and barristers in private practice. The legal aid committees, which administer the scheme, also have to be satisfied that the applicant has a reasonable case on its merits. The services to the client are either free or relatively cheap, the state paying the fees to the lawyers. Over the years the financial eligibility limits have become so low that many people are excluded from the scheme even though they clearly cannot afford to pay lawyers' fees. As a result, many people are effectively excluded from the courts.

Superficially, the history of legal aid has been that of a public service development in the interests of the community and, in particular, those of the poor and disadvantaged. It is, however, more accurately seen as a historical struggle between the professional concerns of private legal practice and the government, and between public service and the private market. In 1949, when the scheme was founded, the Law Society battled with the government to keep legal aid in the hands of private practice and out of the hands of salaried lawyers. The Law Society won, using arguments about the need for lawyers to be independent. Paradoxically, the fact that legal aid has
thereby remained in the hands of private practice has led to an undermining of the independence upon which the Law Society so strongly relied. Rather than responding to need, legal aid practitioners must respond to the requirements of running businesses in a highly competitive market place. This severely limits the range of services that legal aid lawyers can offer to their clients. More seriously, it is the cause of the current decline of the legal aid scheme. When the public purse is constrained by central government spending policies, it cannot compete with commercial concerns and is inevitably squeezed out of the market. Legal aid practitioners are finding it increasingly difficult to make ends meet, and are simply pulling out of the scheme.

The Problems with Legal Aid

The legal aid scheme was limited from the outset. It was developed under a Labour government which was clearly hostile to the intervention of lawyers in the new welfare state. Legal aid was, therefore, generally made available only In those areas in which lawyers had always functioned and not in the area of so-called welfare law. The areas in which private lawyers operated were extended only as a by-product of the development of law centres and of welfare law (for instance, on issues of state support for women and children after divorce).

These limitations of the scheme meant that, as well as being under-funded, It was and still is inherently defective. Although in the criminal courts, in personal injury and in family matters, a large number of people have obtained the services of lawyers through the scheme, legal aid has nevertheless failed to provide the services that are most suited to the needs of vast numbers of people, especially the needs of the working-class, poor or disadvantaged sections of society. These are some of the main problems with our legal aid scheme :

1. Private practitioners have to make a profit, even where paid by the Legal Aid Board, and very often they feel, therefore, that they cannot afford to spend the time that may be required on legal aid cases. As legal aid rates fail to keep up with private rates of pay, practitioners do decreasing amounts of legal aid work. Political, social and economic rights of individuals and sections of society must be enforceable regardless of financial resources, yet a system based on profit in a competitive market cannot achieve this.
2. The attitudes and experiences of most lawyers are quite alien to the majority of poorer clients. The orientation of legal services to money and property matters has led to the development of expertise in areas which, in general, are not those affecting the poor or  working class. Lawyers are drawn mainly from relatively well-off backgrounds, are often public-school educated, white and male and have a very different set of social, personal and financial expectations to many of their clients. There is surrounding lawyers an aura of mystery, tradition and wealth that puts many people off approaching them.
3. The cost associated with lawyers is also a factor that deters many potential clients. Even if they have the benefit of legal aid , they may have to pay contributions.
4. Private practice is mainly geared to litigation as the solution to problems and as a result individualises problems. However, very often solutions are found in a combination of legal argument and expert evidence, and  in the unity and organisation of people involved. Often decisions made by unaccountable authorities and organisations cannot be challenged in the courts. Providing more of the traditional lawyers' skills, as under legal aid, does not alleviate those problems.
5. Rich and corporate clients have always required and had access to the services of many different types of professionals - not only lawyers, but also accountants and financial advisers, public relations consultants, media advisers, personnel advisers, management consultants, and many more. The poorer clients also require a similarly diverse service (although the specific skills may be different to those required by the commercial clients). Legal aid has not provided it and, based as it is on the private-practice model, will never do so.
6. Legal aid is centrally controlled and so is bureaucratic, inflexible, unresponsive and inaccessible. It does not allow for sufficient variation in provision ill different areas of the country to account for different needs. There is very little avenue for those dissatisfied with it to complain or challenge it.
7. There is widespread ignorance of legal rights and the means of enforcing them. Legal aid does not aim to overcome this and consequently has little or no preventative effect. Nor does it encourage self-help and independence. It also fails to counter the low take-up of legal aid due to this ignorance.

These flaws in the legal aid scheme were becoming apparent within 20 years of its inception. At the same time, in the late 1960s and early 1970s, political activity and awareness were burgeoning after the long and relatively passive period since the end of the war. The decline in industrial relations led to an upsurge in trade-union activity and new repressive industrial-relations legislation generated yet more militancy. Black consciousness was also rising. The massive growth of immigration into Britain meant that there was a new political and economic concern about its impact on the country and a concern among many to ensure proper protection of the rights of these new minorities.

The growth in the social and political movements stimulated by these concerns was particularly obvious in the Inner cities, where living conditions for the poor, black and working-class residents deteriorated. These movements challenged the very legitimacy of authoritarian power. The challenge they made was not lust to the rights over which courts had jurisdiction but also to decisions of government, authorities and large corporations which remained relatively unaccountable and un-challengeable within the legal system. There was a demand for services that could operate in a non-litigation-orientated and socially responsive manner.

It was in this context, along with the popular discontent with legal aid and the developing role of lawyers In new forums such as local government, that law centres in England and Wales developed.

Law Centres

In the last 20 years and more, a wide variety of methods of work has been developed by law centres. Since the first law centre in 1970, they have sprung up in many, mainly inner-city, areas of the country, initiated by local community activists and lawyers as a result of perceived local needs for adequate legal services which private practice was failing to meet. Law centres have become popular and much in demand.

Despite the diverse nature of their services, there are common threads running through all law centres:

1. Their services are usually free, thus overcoming many of the problems associated with the means-testing of legal aid or the Law Society charge.
2. Law centres are run by locally elected management committees, which employ the staff of the centres. The management committee decides on the centre's policies and priorities, ensuring that as far as possible each centre responds to local demands and Is accountable to their users.
3. The traditional hierarchical structures of solicitors' offices serve to deny access to lawyers. Law centres have, in various ways, found alternative structures (see Kennedy in this book, and John Fitzpatrick's second article in this chapter).
4. Law centres do not employ lawyers alone. Because of the wide range of services they offer, and their innovative methods of working, they rely on diverse resources. Apart from the lawyers, there are specialists in various aspects of community work, and those with expertise ranging from local government administration to trade unionism, education and housing. Many centres offer a range of languages appropriate to their locality.
5. There are no predetermined limits on their work (other than professional limits) so law centres can work creatively and innovatively in a wide range of issues thus exposing need that would not otherwise be apparent. It was mainly through law centres' prioritising immigration and nationality casework that that area became one of growth and resulted in the establishment of local agencies around the country providing specialist immigration and nationality advice and representation services.
6. They aim to direct their resources to best effect, providing the most needed and popular service for the community in which they operate. This often involves determining priorities and setting criteria by which work is or is not undertaken.
7. Law centres encourage self-help, and aim to provide people with sufficient information to deal themselves with actual or potential legal problems without unnecessary dependence on lawyers. They produce leaflets, posters and other publications that are easy to understand and often in languages other than English. They give talks, explaining to people what their rights are and how they can enforce or defend them. They work with local groups and organisations, providing them with the necessary information and support so they can put forward their own views and demands to their local authority, employer or landlord.
8. They deliberately set out to attract and encourage users who would not normally approach lawyers in private practice. Generally they are in shop-front, high-street premises or other offices designed to attract such people. However, the more important aspect of the law centre approach is the way in which they target the working-class, disadvantaged or vulnerable people in their areas, providing them with information and encouraging them to exercise their rights. The centres will often have to make a commitment to give quite long-term support to growing organisations and campaigns to achieve this.
9. Law centres have also found that needs for legal services are often concealed and need to be deliberately searched out. So in an area with no agency providing advice on schools and education, very few problems of that nature will come to the attention of local lawyers. Parents, teachers and pupils become more frustrated with the inadequacies of the local education scheme and respond in a haphazard and individualistic way - for instance, parents may remove their children from the school, which in turn results in further degeneration of the abandoned schools. However, the provision of specialist advice on education issues will result in a growth of awareness of the real problems and possible means of tackling them. In many areas where law centres have recently begun to provide such advice, parents have organised themselves for the first time into effective groups which make unique and valuable contributions to the development of their local education systems.
10. The function of law centres is therefore very different to that of Citizens' Advice Bureaux and other generalist advice agencies, which tend to offer an open door to all requiring advice and operate on an Individual case-by-case level. Law centres have developed close working relationships with these other agencies at a local level, referring cases to each other, often jointly identifying and tackling issues, and pressing for further advice and legal services in areas of still unmet need.

The Legal Aid Board, which was invested with duties under the Legal Aid Act 1988 to run the legal aid scheme and ensure other forms of legal advice, assistance and representation, is currently engaged in two major exercises in the reform of the policy and practice of legal services.

First, in the name of efficiency, it is experimenting with a reform of the green form scheme (by which eligible individuals obtain a limited amount of legal advice and assistance). Solicitors' firms and law and advice centres which participate will obtain a franchise to deliver these services. They will have to conform to a range of criteria imposed by the Board, and will be subject to close review and monitoring. In return, there will be some small improvements in the system of payment for these services. It remains to be seen whether this scheme will have any significant impact on services or practice.

Secondly, the Board is considering its future role in relation to the funding of law centres. These areas of activity are closely linked. Each arises from the endeavours of the Board to find a cheaper means of being seen to meet the ever-increasing demands for effective legal services.

The issues involved in many respects mirror transactions between local authorities and their grantees, all of which are part of the deepening contract culture. Contracts are seen by many as attractive because they can provide a degree of financial security. However, they also carry the grave dangers of increased control by the funder, and loss of flexibility and responsiveness.

The contract approach is not surprising. Major industries are being privatised, local authorities are required to tender competitively, public services generally are obliged to compete with the private sector in cost-efficiency and profit-making, and representatives of financial and
industrial concerns are now running the health service and other public services. Decisions which ought to be made according to need and social welfare are now being made so as to enable big business to continue to reap vast profits, and to prepare commercial concerns for the European marketplace. At the same time, any democratic control of, or participation in public service provision is being stamped upon systematically. The Poll Tax with, worse, the capping of many authorities, is the most recent example of the atrocities being committed in the name of accountability and Improved services.

Starting with the Lord Chancellor's Department's Legal Aid Efficiency Scrutiny report of 1986, the proposals to cash-limit legal aid and to drive law and advice centres into competitive bidding provoked widespread opposition. Despite superficially abandoning those proposals in the subsequent Legal Aid Act, the government and the Board have so far failed to produce any satisfactory proposals as to the development of non-profit legal services and have, instead, set an agenda which has focused attention increasingly on contracts and the supervision or control which accompanies them.

Most recently the Lord Chancellor's Department has published its 'Review of Eligibility for Legal Aid ' in which the main proposal is that litigants only become eligible for legal aid once the costs of a case exceed a level determined according to the litigant's means. This will mean that all but the very poorest will have to pay substantial sums, possibly thousands of pounds, towards the costs of litigation before they receive any legal aid at all. The effect will be to deter litigants through cost. The proposals have attracted widespread opposition. Nevertheless, the review does provide considerable opportunities for the reform of legal services. it represents an acknowledgement of the deep problems within the legal aid scheme and the need for reform of legal services, including the development of alternatives to legal aid.

Containment of costs will always be a requirement of central government. However, the starting point for determining provision should not be primarily a financial exercise. The fundamental issues of the different roles of the law in society - as the arbiter of business disputes on the one hand, and as a framework for securing democratic rights on the other - must underpin any programme for meeting unmet legal need. The financial questions can be answered by ensuring that legal services are deployed as effectively as possible to relieve the greatest needs.

There is a great deal of discussion to be had on how to resolve this in practice. There are already models on which to base legal services reform and development. Law centres and advice agencies could be developed to carry out casework and provide advice and information in the context of an overall strategic plan for the delivery of legal  services. In this way they would tackle underlying problems in a manner that Is responsive to the particular concerns of the poor and working class. With adequate resources, they could handle the majority of non-commercial cases. They could also, with far greater expertise and authority than the Legal Aid Board could ever have as a central government body, monitor those that participate in any legal services scheme and make sure that their work is of the highest quality.