The value of a network: read our latest annual review!

Law Centres’ membership fees made up just 9% of the income of the Law Centres Network (LCN) in the past year, while 87% of its expenditure was on its members. This significant return on investment is reported on in the new LCN annual review published today (Friday).

The funding highlight of the year came when LCN supported 23 Law Centres to apply for funds from The Access to Justice Foundation’s new Improving Lives Through Advice grants programme. 14 Law Centres were successful, giving them access to unrestricted core funding totalling £5.4 million over the next five years—providing the kind of longer-term stability that Law Centres need to thrive.

Grants aside, we have supported Law Centres through another civil legal aid commissioning exercise, at the end of which they are now a full 3% of civil legal aid providers in England and Wales.

In their key areas of work, Law Centres’ footprint is larger still: they now make up over 1 in 7 of housing legal aid providers and nearly 1 in 8 of immigration legal aid providers.

Our collective strength as a network was acknowledged at this years’ Law Centres Annual Conference. Over 100 Law Centre delegates gathered at Birmingham City University in June for a different kind of conference; the traditional format and timing was changed in favour of a participative event. Praised as a ‘festival of ideas’, its focus was on identifying our shared priorities and seeing just how working more closely together can help us all reach further.

Some of these ideas have already come to fruition. Law Centres expressed the need for support with policy advocacy, so, right after the general election, we equipped Law Centres with fresh guidance, drafted with member input, on engaging with the many new MPs. Further guidance followed, highlighting lines to take, supporting evidence, preferred turns of phrase, and recommended methods. We continue to advocate with the new government and support Law Centres to do so, too.

This year, we went beyond engaging our current members. In July, LCN held its first ever reunion event, recognising and bringing together over sixty alumni from Law Centres’ founder generation in the 1970s and 1980s. Several peers, senior judges, practising lawyers and others have jumped at the opportunity to reconnect, and many have shown interest in contributing to the network again.

LCN also helps Law Centres make the most of external connections. A project at Harrow Law Centre led us to draw on considerable support from law firm A&O Shearman in sending Freedom of Information Act requests to all 49 police forces in the UK. Our findings, of inconsistent training and guidance, variable support and patchy data collection, were captured in a recent report.

Building external connections is also central to LCN’s hub project with three Law Centres. Holistic, joined-up approaches and increased community visibility are driving structural changes that help not only solve problems but prevent them. See how Suffolk Law Centre has taken this approach to fighting disability discrimination.

Additionally, LCN oversees the network’s development in IT and digital matters. This year saw 15 Law Centres assisted to secure Cyber Essentials accreditation. We are also leading on the network’s exploration of AI: trying and assessing available tools, sharing our experience and insight, and considering practical issues, such as the appropriateness of using AI for advice triage and signposting. Watch this space!

Law Centre alumni converse at the July reunion event