Central England Law Centre
A note from our CEO
What drives us? Dedication, professionalism and humanity; and our determination to continue to use specialist legal expertise to prevent and tackle problems faced by people who are disadvantaged in society.
2016 was our 40thanniversary and our mission is as relevant today as when we began.
We have bucked the trend in the last 10 years. Reductions in local authority funding, combined with catastrophic cuts to legal aid have caused many law centres and other independent advice agencies to close or to shrink in size; leaving ‘advice deserts’ and severely compromising access to justice for those who are poorest and most excluded in our society.
By contrast, we have almost doubled in size, reaching out from our Coventry birthplace to fill a great need in Birmingham. We have not replaced what legal aid removed, and there are still significant barriers for some of the most vulnerable people in our communities in accessing justice, but we have found ways to use our expertise and to continue our mission to fight social exclusion in communities and to effect change in society by using legal processes.
I guess from the outside it would seem that we must have been bold to achieve this. My feeling is that it has been much more to do with having amazing, hugely dedicated people within the organisation.
The way we have dealt with cuts to our funding has been to be very clear that we would still provide free legal advice and that our mission remains to help those who are most disenfranchised and vulnerable. We have, however, started to shift our emphasis to get better at using our expertise to improve knowledge of legal rights and capability to manage problems in our communities, and also to provide our expertise early in a problem to head it off before it becomes a catastrophe.
This aligns very well with funders who are looking to promote early intervention and capability building. We’ve also been much more focused on really tackling the issues behind presenting problems, bringing together the full range of our expertise and working in partnership with other organisations so that we can genuinely say we are making a difference to people’s lives. In that vein, we are investing time in developing better ways of measuring our impact because we need to be able to tell that story.
At the last count we had 32 different funders. We have relationships with Coventry, Warwick, Birmingham City and Birmingham University and we are just exploring a relationship with the University of Law in Birmingham. They provide us with students and pay us for supervision – which increases our capacity and helps keep our specialist lawyers in post. Most of this activity is focused on filling the gaps in legal aid for immigration and employment advice.
We have various forms of support from some of the bigger firms in Birmingham (they are sponsoring two trainee solicitor posts) and Allen and Overy, who are sponsoring another trainee solicitor and also providing telephone support to the students who run our employment clinics - they’ve also given us some funding to help make that work.
We are running some fairly innovative projects or programmes that attract national recognition.
- Ignite is a 5 year programme where we are being funded to work within the public sector to change systems and approaches and to make a shift to earlier intervention. This work is focused on children’s services in Coventry and in Whitefriars Housing management
- We’re heading up Kids in Need of Defense UK - a collaboration with a programme in the US (called KIND)and Coram Children’s Legal Centre and Islington Law Centre. It’s funded by Microsoft and two UK foundations and it’s a model of unlocking pro bono capacity from larger commercial firms to take on immigration cases for children.
At the heart of all of this our focus is still on providing casework and representation.
Family Law is integral to what we are about. We began offering this legal service five years ago because so many of our clients were victims of domestic violence (DV),and not being able to assist with that was an obvious gap in ambition to meet the multiple and complex needs of many of our clients.
The service is now at a point where we would like to expand it. We’ve built strong relationships within the DV sector in the city and our immigration expertise means we’ve been able to focus on women with no recourse to public funds.
We’ve also been building our public law children work. We’re ambitious to build that further and we’re also considering expanding our family work to Birmingham when legal aid contracts are tendered.
Our focus as an organisation is very much on families and children:
- We are funded to run a service that works alongside children’s services in Coventry (this is different from Ignite) and is based on home visits to families being supported by the Children and Families First Team. This uncovers a plethora of need – mostly debt, benefits issues, housing and DV. Some of those families then also come to us if the council starts care proceedings.
- Our public law team is running a project with a women’s organisation based in Yorkshire that is seeking to reduce the number of women and girls who have their children removed by the local authority, even though they themselves are care leavers and should be receiving corporate parenting support.
- In Birmingham, our focus has been on destitute families who are ‘supported’ by the local authority.
We have an amazing team of lawyers, and a culture of mutual support where every voice counts within the organisation. We’re keen to embrace new approaches and ideas, and we have a national reputation for innovation and excellence.
We see this vacancy as an opportunity to strengthen our Family team and to move further towards our ambition of providing Family services across the region.
If you think you can help us achieve our goals, we’d love to hear from you
Sue Bent
Chief Executive
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