Organisation Summary

Aims, objectives and status

South West London Law Centres (SWLLC) is a charitable company limited by guarantee that exists to reduce poverty and promote education in Croydon, Kingston, Merton, Richmond, Sutton and Wandsworth. We are run by a diverse board of trustees who live and work in South West London and give us their time for free.

We believe that everyone is entitled to a safe, warm home; protection from discrimination, harassment and violence; a minimum income; and respect for their rights, whether at work, at home, in education or care.

We help people to understand and enforce their rights by:

  • giving them high quality advice and representing them in courts and tribunals
  • providing information and training
  • brokering legal assistance for local charities
  • learning from the problems our clients face and working with public bodies to prevent them happening in the future

Services and activities

We offer professional free legal advice and representation services, principally but not exclusively to a diverse range of people on low incomes, from five office locations across our catchment – Battersea, Tooting Broadway, Morden, Croydon and Kingston. We also run twelve volunteer-led free legal advice services from our premises and those of other organisations in the evenings each week. Our 47 paid staff and 350 volunteers provide advicein the following areas of expertise:

Professional

  • Housing
  • Immigration
  • Employment
  • Welfare Benefits
  • Debt
  • Community Care
  • Discrimination with respect to goods and services

Volunteer

  • Housing
  • immigration
  • Debt
  • Employment
  • Help with Small Claims
  • Consumer
  • Family
  • General Litigation
  • Personal Injury

We do not act for employers against employees or for landlords against tenants.

Context

SWLLC’s cases are primarily referred to it by partner agencies. We work with those agencies in a variety of ways to co-ordinate services, remove barriers to advice for actual and potential clients, share information that improves the way that advice services are organised and provided, and raise funding to improve delivery and sustainability.

We are members of the Kingston Advice Forum, Wandsworth Advice Forum and the Merton and Sutton Advice Alliance, and we are currently working in Croydon to establish an advice forum there. We are active in the South West London Advice (SWLA) forum and the London Advice Forum, and in the LSC's Provider Reference Group for London.

We are the lead member of the SWLA Advice Plus project, working with twelve partners to improve the accessibility and quality of advice services across our sub-region, and developing approaches to reducing the demand for legal services by early intervention and public legal education. We have a £500,000 grant from the Big Lottery Fund for this work until 2012.

SWLLC holds contracts for the County Court Duty Schemes in the three County Courts in South West London. These are all multi-party schemes. They involve local advice agencies and firms of solicitors. We administer the rotas, handle claims, negotiate with the LSC and make payments on behalf of the partners.

SWLLC holds a contract with the Equality and Human Rights Commission to provide advice on all aspects of discrimination law to people in South West and North London. Our delivery partners are four other Law Centres, on whose behalf we co-ordinate quarterly reports to the EHRC, as well as payments.

SWLLC hosts the Croydon Housing Aid Society in its premises and provides administrative support and supervision to its caseworkers, under contract.

Achievements

We are the largest Law Centre in Great Britain. We advise and assist around 26,000 people each year, including over 3,000 full cases via our professional staff and nearly 6,000 people helped at our evening surgeries by volunteers. We have a casework success rate that has been consistently above 90% for many years. We take almost all our professional cases by referral, those cases that community organisations, CABx, private practice, MPs and Councillors find too complex to deal with, either legally or because of the care needs of the client. Almost 80% of our clients are non-White British, with many facing language barriers to their rights. More than a quarter of our clients identify as disabled. Our Trustee board is representative of the diverse community we serve.

We have three peer-reviewers on our staff, covering Welfare Benefits, Housing and Immigration, and our Community Care solicitor, once a trainee with us, has recently taken up a new position as Principal Legal Advisor at the Care Quality Commission. We have a long-standing commitment to quality services, and to educating both the public and new lawyers in a wide range of legal areas. Our Training Principal was Legal Aid Lawyer of the Year in 2004.

We have developed strong relationships over many years that enable us to add enormous value to the funding we receive through LSC contracts. In addition to almost £900,000 of income from the LSC, our generous supporters amongst City law firms donate over £100,000 each year and we have a wide range of other funders that gives us a broad income base worth a further £900,000. We have projects that target our services at young people, older people, disabled people and their carers, BAME people, people in institutional care, asylum seekers and refugees, and people who suffer discrimination on other grounds.

In recent years we’ve collaborated on research that sheds light on our legal system and changes we can make to improve it. Our research with anthropologists from the London School of Economics helped them to show the negative effects suffered by clients, advice workers, and even civil servants as a result of the changes made to procedures governing the UK’s borders, conclusions which have recently been replicated in the a more positive development in Solihull. Our work with the New Economics Foundation helped both of us to understand the interaction between client and adviser drivers during the advice process, the centrality of the relationship between adviser and client to the promotion of quality and good outcomes, and the reassuring similarity between the goals and success criteria of both adviser and advised in an agency like SWLLC with a focus on outcomes rather than process.