Frontline Hackney- A day in the life of the Law

British Kid

2012-03-04T13:48:00.001-08:00

Irina is from Bulgaria. She has a childwho is British, and in school. Her son understands that Mummy andDaddy fight.

For many years Irina has lived with aBritish partner who does not let her work or draw Child Benefit. Hedoles out money, he locks her out of the property with her “halfcaste” child when he wants to, he pushes and squeezes her, hegenerally abuses and controls her.

When he is happy she is a lovely birdin a gilded cage. For many years she has been frightened. Her sonshares in her fear.

I sit and sift through the paperworkand realise that if Irina were to flee her home with her child, weshould have a cast iron benefit system in place to help this victimof domestic violence and her British child. Sadly we do not.

Instead, she has literally no rights atall to welfare benefits or public housing. Or else she has, butproving it is strewn with mind bending mine-fields, impossible toread European directives, a smattering of immigration law, a bit offamily law, a lot of inter-disciplinary work, confused publicagencies with bad guidance.

I call the women's refuges and learnthat if Irina has residency problems, they can not help her. Evenrefuges for battered women are under the cosh for cash. If they can'tbe sure they can get Housing Benefit they can't run as a goingconcern. The staff are ashamed and apologetic.

So I have a case where Irina and herBritish child must potentially fight their case tooth and claw inthe immigration court, in the benefits tribunal, in the housingcourts, in the family courts. All this to ensure that a British kidand his mother can get away to a place of safety.

Under the new Legal Aid Bill this isan issue we won't care about much longer, because from April 2013 thepractice of social welfare law is dead in all but name. There won'tbe any funding in place to protect the interests of a British childwith a foreign mother like Irina,

When did we become so cruel? When didvested power become so cynical?

When did they decide to make LawCentres Extinct?

Benny & the Cop

2012-02-17T14:21:00.000-08:00

A few years ago Benny called us up totell us that his landlord had turned up with the police to put himonto the street. As you may imagine, he was quite upset. As it wassix o'clock on a Friday, I was quite upset. I rescheduled theappointment with my pint by a few hours.

Benny lived in a house in multipleoccupation. That is to say, a number of residents rent bedrooms butshare facilities like kitchen and bathroom. Sometimes these are fourbedroom flats, sometimes vertical Victorian buildings that once wererespectable homes for a middle class family with three or moreservants. Sometimes the residents are families squeezed cheek byjowl, sometimes youngsters trying to hack it.

Each case is a snap-shot of peopleliving on the margins in expensive London.

In Benny's case the landlord had turfedout one of the tenants by means unknown, and moved a relative 'spossessions into the property. He's trying to get around theprotection from eviction legislation by pretending that his familywas living there all along, and just taking lodgers.

Thus, he would avoid going to Court .He would give reasonable oral notice and then put his lodgers ontothe street.

I ask Benny to give his mobile phone tothe Constable, and I ask him whether he is confident that an illegaleviction isn't occurring, which is an offence by the way, and I havesome papers which make me worried.

The Constable tells me he's just hereto keep the peace, and that he's not trained to assess civildisputes. The landlord goes away and eventually gets a proper order,and Benny has to leave.

So far so dull. What worries me isthis.

Although the Police have ample powerstoday to bust the fake tenants who sport forged tenancy agreementsand trash the landlord's possessions in the back garden, they choosenot to. They wisely accept that they are not trained in civil law. Or they lazily prioritise drug smugglers and and gang killings. Youtake your pick.

The LASPO Bill will criminalisesquatting. At this point the Police will have to arrest Benny, unlesshe has a lawyer conveniently at the end of a phone. And the Policewill then in many cases assist illegal evictions. Which is anoffence.

With evictions climbing as HousingBenefit caps start to bite in posh boroughs like Westminster, and inless posh boroughs like Hackney, I ask myself this question. Is itcheaper to criminalise alleged squatters, and force the CPS to learnhousing law, or is it better to allow charities and other legal aidfirms fight it out in the civil courts?

Violence in Office

2012-01-20T14:14:00.000-08:00

The Law Centre is surging with people. More and more have eviction notices, court dates and tight benefit appeal deadlines. Volunteers and staff perch in every office, trying to advise the poor and the upset.

The photocopier hums as Kim meticulously turns over piles of paper and documents. A member of staff is sitting with Pierre, a shattered refugee who, it turns out, has been drinking. We don't have alarm bells (heck, we ain't got staplers) and he becomes florid, incoherent and waves his arms around. All at once he becomes terrifying.

One of the other lawyers speaks some French, and eventually he seems pacified and burst into tears. His history is truly heartbreaking, he has serious mental health concerns and suddenly he falls asleep.

We shepherd him out without calling the police and he seems brighter and more happy."Adieu"says the member of staff rustily and Pierre looks crushed. "Au Revoir" says the member of staff and suddenly his smile is like a sunbeam. Man, this French is tough.

Years ago Patrick, a sad old man drinking and lost from his family was evicted from social housing for being an annoying drunk. We argued that he was vulnerable because he had a tendency to self harm. The Authority deemed the risk low. We explained to him why this was the end of the line.

Patrick perfectly understood the legal niceties of risk assessments, and on the day of his eviction arrived at our office blind drunk and cut his wrists in the bathroom. An ambulance came and he survived. He also bled all over the donated children's toys which forced us to throw them all away.

We have a policy that prohibits abuse of staff, racist ranting and threatening behaviour. Yet vulnerable people with severe mental health problems increasingly come to our door. It seems we are the favourite port of call for those who drink at the last chance saloon.

Eventually another client begins to scream. It might be something that the Council or their landlord is doing to them. It might be blame and recrimination towards our advisers who have not warded their misfortunes with legal argument sufficiently. In the end it makes little difference.

Working in this environment takes its toll. All that stress, all that shouting, the adrenaline becomes poisonous after a while. Experienced lawyers, trained to work with the worst of the worst, can't keep on working in these conditions.

In a sense I agree with Kenneth Clarke and Jonathan Djanogli, sponsors of the Bill that will strip most funding from social welfare Legal Aid. If the public services worked properly, and they should, I would happily hang up my shingle, because there would be no need for a lawyer.

No need for a lawyer then?Yet cases for the Social Worker and the Therapist keep on arriving at our door. When we are gone, where will these people, these human beings, be sent to next?

Happy New Year

2012-01-11T11:08:00.000-08:00

So I come into the office. Among other delights is a sea of letter from the Legal Aid people querying our funding applications or outright rejecting them. My particular favourite concerns Danny, a former showman who wants to sue his former landlord for disposing of his life's belongings when it shouldn't have.

In Danny's case we have a letter cutting off my client's legal aid because he has not paid his contribution. A letter of the same date confirms receipt of the same contribution. I try to telephone the Legal Aid people but the recorded message tells me that they have cut their telephone access by 4 hours a day "to improve efficiency". So I will have to write. Unfortunately they can take between 4 weeks and several months to reply. And meanwhile, Danny's case remains in limbo.

This stuff must be dry as dust to non lawyers, but as Frontline's readership now includes people in Macedonia, Venezuela and Australia (thanks guys my hubris needs constant fuelling) there seems to be some interest so here's a crash course. In an emergency we can grant 4 week's Legal Aid. However currently the Legal Aid people are taking eight to twelve weeks to put the Full Legal Aid in place. This means that typically we risk being unfunded, or not knowing when we're funded, for weeks at a time. Working without funding threatens charities, already falling like flies, and leaves the client exposed to legal difficulties. What to do?

In the the case of Denise, who has been in the UK for 16 years after arriving as a child, she risks losing her home because the Home Office is years late in looking at her case and meantime she can neither work to support her family, as she wishes, nor claim benefits. Through some legal jiggeryy pokery we manage to issue a judicial review in the High Court to get Social Services to pay her rent and provide her with £30 a week on food vouchers, and appear before a District Judge in the County Court to suspend a warrant of execution (that's the magic piece of paper that you moves you from your home onto the pavement).

Then we have to keep on working but don't know whether we'll get paid for the subsequent twelve weeks' work while we wait for Legal Aid paperwork to arrive. Had we done nothing, Denise could have lost her case at the next hearing. Children would become homeless. This is not why we come into the office every day. So we're gambling on it all working out with our funders and do the work anyway, but too often we manage to secure a triumph for the client, then are told two thirds of our work won't be paid for after all.

Meantime they've already cut our funding by 10% across the board, in anticipation of a further 64% cut to the number of people in Hackney who will lose civil Legal Aid if the Bill goes though.

The cuts in one guise or another are already all around Legal Aid. Happy New Year. It's lucky I'm such a philosophical fellow.

Standing One Inch Tall

2011-12-02T13:50:00.000-08:00

Leila is from abroad. She has a baby in a buggy and a cute little girl who asks me politely for a pen so she can draw. The children are well dressed and impeccably behaved.

Although she has been in this country long enough that one child is in school, her immigration case has been refused, and she and her family are being evicted from their hostel by Social Services today.

I have to tell her we've reached the end of the line. She can go to a home her children have never seen, put her children into care, or disappear. I'm prohibited by law from advising her to disappear, but what woman voluntarily abandons her children into care if she has some other option? And how can she take her British born children to face penury in a country where the welfare state is non-existent?

Leila gives me piece of her mind in a dignified way. As she leaves I feel one inch tall. It's not my fault the law works this way, but I still feel guilty.

Lorelei had a disabled child, and for a period survived by giving blow jobs in car parks so she could feed him. We were able to do something for her after a while.

In this great city where over 300 languages are spoken every day, the humiliation and privation that you are subjected to vectors first towards skin colour and the foreign, and then a lack of the right documents. In this great city people will do what they have to, to get by.

Kenneth Clarke the Justice Minister recently said there was an "army of lawyers advancing behind a line of women and children, saying of course they are not concerned about the income of the profession; their only concern is for these vulnerable clients who will be adversely affected if they are not paid at the rate they currently are.”

Kenneth, I can tell you this for free. If you had seen the so called army of women and children I have seen, you too would feel one inch tall.

Postcard for Dudi

2011-11-23T13:05:00.000-08:00

My great grandfather was Spanish. Salvador was a railway engineer by trade, who rose to be a transport minister for the Republican Government of Spain in the civil war against Franco's Fascists. Dudi, as we call him, stands over our family like a colossus, spreading his shade.

Family history and myth relate the moments when he decided to flee Spain. His car was stopped by gun-men from his own side at a roadblock. After giving his name he was politely escorted to a bullet-pocked wall and relieved of his jacket. An overzealous official double checks his first name as the firing squad cock their rifles.

“I'm Salvador, not Andres” says Dudi. “Sorry comrade” says the official and sends him on his way.

Dudi took his Scottish wife and two daughters to England and became a refugee. Many years later, after he had settled in Switzerland and written scores of books, he found himself landing in an aeroplane in Franco's Spain due to weather conditions. He tells the air-crew he might be shot if he lands, so they keep him on board and hide his presence, while they take on fuel. Can you possibly imagine that this could happen post 9-11?

Fatma and her daughter were granted refugee status, and now the daughter teaches. Hussein who is gay receives his leave to remain, because he has a civil spouse and, if he was deported with his husband, why they'd both be lynched on a crane. Case after case, I've seen deserving families given succour. The great convention on refugees still stands to protect those who have suffered persecution (as long as they have a lawyer).

Sadly, swingeing cuts mean really great charities like the Refugee Legal Centre closed their doors this year after 40 years or so. They tried to re-brand, but to no avail. The public sympathy is against refugees.

At least 64% of people receiving civil legal aid will lose a service in Hackney. That's 5,000 people, one tenth of the 50,000 people in London who will lose out. Sadly, there will be no funding anymore for social welfare law in almost all cases, and immigration will be cut to the bone.

And so Dudi, you great European Liberal, your dream of rights for refugees is still alive, and the shade your generation casts means we still observe the Refugee Convention and the Human Rights Act.

Only 10 Lib Dem MP's rebelled against the LASPO Bill in the third reading in the Commons. That was 10 brave people. 51 Lords spoke against the bill. That was 51 experts giving the bill a real kicking. We shall see.

Walk the Line

2011-11-10T13:15:00.000-08:00

3,000 people walked through our doors in the last year. That's at least a 40% climb in people seeking legal advice. There are a dozen salaried staff, many part time. Wonderful volunteers defend the parapets.

We run out of stamps, our photocopiers break down, and suddenly we find it is almost impossible to print a letter. Without the ability to print letters we are a little like Silvio Berlusconi, all fur coat and no knickers.

Staplers break, pens stop working. It's all a bit spooky.

Chorouk observes that when she tries to print a letter the little twiddly gears on the photocopier start to melt. For every page she prints or copies she has to extract 9 mangled pages from the bowels of the beast, one at a time. She's a trainee solicitor, with oak leaves.

The Xerox call centre in Manilla promises a speedy response when we pay our bill. The thing is, our Legal Aid funding was cut by 10% last month. So already the bills are a problem.

Paula arrives without 3 of her 5 children. The kids are beautifully behaved. She's homeless tomorrow.

Hossein who is mentally ill arrives distraught and he also is homeless tomorrow!

Rita, Sue and Bob come in to talk about housing, benefit and immigration rights. The money problems have to be put to the back of the queue. It's not nice because if your giro's stopped you're going to be upset and worried. However evictions and deportations top our resource-meter (to use management speak) because they are catastrophic events.

Emails are sent, writs are drafted in our heads and we generally run around like chickens doing the Legal Aid dance.

When the dust settles no-one is homeless tonight and no-one has been deported. Good result? I hope so.

Volunteer Miranda walks in while the dust settles with the client with no name we all forgot about. She's housed a person with a few phone calls and has no idea why we start to cheer.

Walk the line, do the right thing, fear no-one. It's getting to be so difficult. Which is why we're closing our doors to new clients for a month.

Violence at Home

2011-10-31T15:45:00.000-07:00

And so to Parliament again to hear about the impact of Legal Aid cuts on victims of domestic violence in a report by that very British group, the Women's Institute.

Jean suffered domestic violence 40 years ago. Her husband and assailant was a wealthy man. He held her under his sway. He put her in the hospital, and were it not for Legal Aid she would not have obtained her divorce or custody of the children. Her husband was convicted of causing GBH. She tells us that without Legal Aid, she would have gone home to the man who put her in intensive care.

Sam learnt that her partner had been convicted of tying up and raping a child. When she asked him to go he refused to do so. Eventually he went to prison for what she saw as an attempt to kill her by stabbing or breaking of the neck after she'd put the kids to bed. He went to prison, but for years after he stalked her, even in Court. She says that without a doubt she would now be dead if she had not been able to get help from the Courts.

Claudia managed to escape, but has to tolerate her daughter asking why her dad, who has contact with their daughter regularly, tells her that Claudia's not her mum. “You're white and she's black” he says. A wise child knows her own father I think, but most know their mother.

The proposed Legal Aid cuts are catastrophic.

If, in the last 12 months you have managed to get the man who used to hit you into prison or get him on trial, if you have managed to get any judge anywhere to state on the record that your allegations of domestic violence are proven, then you will get a service. If it happened more than a year later you won't get any help if psycho husband turns up.

If you manage to get a social worker concerned about the impact of the domestic violence that's good. If the police and the social workers have a meeting and declare that you are likely to suffer GBH or something worse that will help to get you a service.

Good luck with that then.

To get Legal Aid for domestic violence it is not sufficient to walk into a police station with a black eye. Convictions for rapists and assailants are very low. But if you have managed to achieve a conviction against your assailant in the last 12 months (no longer) you could get Legal Aid.

The government line is that objective evidence must be obtained that the woman is at a high risk of violence. The matter is being debated as we speak. But as anyone who knows anything about domestic violence will tell you, often the only witnesses to violent events are the victim and the perpetrator. Victims feel undermined and isolated, hiding their bruises, failing to report their rapes. They are cowed, they blame themselves.

One survey found that 70% of women in refuges failed to report their abuse to the police. With pitiful conviction rates for offences like rape, you can see their point.

The government's adoption of a new definition of domestic violence for which funding will be available will prevent many domestic violence victims, as recognised by by the Association of Chief Police Officers, from getting Legal Aid and thus they will have to represent themselves. They will have to be subjected to cross-examination by their assailants, something which in criminal rape trials is becoming a thing of the past.

Baroness Scotland, the Shadow Attorney General, tells us that in the last government domestic violence was reduced by 65%, constituting a saving of £7.5 billion pounds in social costs. It seems that this trend will now go into reverse.

In the debates the Legal Aid Minister Jonathan Djanogly states "I am not questioning the integrity of genuine victims. However, many people during the legal aid consultation were concerned about providing an incentive for unfounded allegations and the government shares this concern."

What really? The 5,000 response to the consultation included a significant response from rational people who felt it was too easy for battered women to get Legal Aid. I rather doubt that.

My brain fries at a certain point. I don't do family law, I just smell something that's not right. Justice doesn't smell like this. Not right, not fair.

Write to your MP. It takes 30 seconds on Justice for All's website http://act.justice-for-all.org.uk/lobby/12

Cancer: LSC doesn't give ATOS

2011-10-19T12:02:00.000-07:00

Hard core devotees will remember the case of Annie who was refused benefits although she had cancer. For the rest of you here's a refresher. http://frontlinehackney.blogspot.com/2011/07/cancer-who-gives-atos.html.

It had a happy ending. We went to the Tribunal twice, but she got her benefits reinstated. Even better, an appointment with a British doctor was likely to be made soon, and there was every hope that she would start getting help from the NHS she so badly needed.

So I shut the case down, bundled it up and sent the file off to the Legal Services Commission for them to look at my bill.

A few weeks ago they wrote back saying they weren't going to pay me for 80% of my work because since the LSC won't pay for advocacy in the Tribunals (I was doing that bit for free) they would not pay for preparation for the hearing.

Never mind that we won and righted a great wrong. Never mind that this interpretation of the rules was counter to the last 10 Tribunal cases we had done. Never mind that this Legal Aid Funding has always been for all steps up to but excluding the actual hearing.

I only had 14 days to appeal. My appeal is late.

While my fortnight was ticking by we helped scores of people in danger of losing their homes, met immigration appeal deadlines of a week or less, housed homeless families at the 11th hour. My partner was in hospital, my secretary's daughter was in the hospital, we spent the time we had to help real people with real problems.

And now it seems we won't get paid for the work we did for Annie.

In a last ditch experiment I shall be sending our appeal late, and attaching copies of this blog. I shall be appealing to their humanity and British common sense. Then I shan't be holding my breath.

2011-10-19T11:27:00.001-07:00

2011-10-13T16:06:00.001-07:00

Frontline Hackney- A day in the life of the Law

A third sector lawyer writes about what makes him mad, sad, and happy to be human
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Wednesday, 12 October 2011
"We're all Potential Benefit Claimants" : Jenny
The warped standards with which society judges those on sickness benefits sets us all up for feelings of self-loathing if we lose our jobs. Hey, that's capitalism!

Difficult events plus a predisposition towards depression has meant my life has often been a roller-coaster experience.

A degree and jobs which fed my confidence confounded psychiatrists’ predictions that I’d only ever manage part-time low-stress work. Then recession hit my area of work badly, and following my second redundancy I spent two years unemployed.

After crashing out of a temporary job in less than a week, I made a claim for employment support allowance (ESA). The application process was humiliating, and unfit for assessing varying mental health conditions, exacerbating feelings of self-loathing. Scoring zero points in the assessment confirmed my belief that I was weak and lazy, not depressed, a reaction stemming from prevailing societal attitudes and the illness itself.

I appealed, but felt too scared to attend when the tribunal date arrived. I stopped claiming benefits, came off the anti-depressants I couldn’t believe were helping, and sank into the worst depression of my life. Trying to fake the positive feelings I didn’t believe I’d ever have again, I began waking early, having suicidal thoughts, and plummeting in weight.

Welfare reform was up for debate in Parliament, and the media was full of the usual scrounger rhetoric.

I followed the discussion of sickness claimants who are ‘not really ill’ and realised they were talking about me.

A myth is being perpetuated that once signed off, no one claiming sickness benefit would ever work again unless forced to do so. It’s not true. I was desperate to work, and found that unemployment was confidence draining and deadly dull.

I did not receive appropriate support at the time, but have now found work under my own steam.

Cuts in Legal Aid are a disgrace. People who are mentally ill should not have their services cut.

Legal Aid Cuts

who judge others by these warped standards should be warned: the harder you are on others now, the more you’ll loath yourself when it’s you.

I’m privileged: six months with my parents in a better NHS postcode got me the support that led me to choose to live, and once on that path the desire to work grew rapidly. I’ve now been working for five months, and am more content than ever before in my adult life.

Almost anyone could have my experience, with poor mental health being caused and exacerbated by unemployment. Many who face long-term joblessness because of their mental health conditions have far more serious challenges to overcome than I did.

They may never have their confidence built by a job where they are truly valued, and society tells them they’re to blame for that. Meanwhile, Government cuts: programmes which used to give hope; legal aid for benefit cases; and benefits as cost of living soars.
Posted by Nathaniel Mathews at 14:41 0 comments
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Saturday, 1 October 2011
Gerrymandering Homeless Children
Henrietta left her council flat when her husband got a job abroad in Las Vegas. It seemed like a logical choice at the time. They were both going to make it big.

For a while everything was good. Her husband had a dream job, they were going to have a baby.

But when the child came along their relationship crumbled. Some men can't cope with proper responsibility. Having a real baby, shitting and grizzling is stressful- and some men can't take it. I guess they think of their dicks as a magic wand that has no payback.

When their marriage broke down, when her husband stopped paying for housekeeping for his kid, when she didn't have diapers or food, she realised that this man was no good for her or her baby, so she went home to the UK.

She stayed with a friend in Westminster, poshest of boroughs. After six months of ignoring her when she came asking for help and advice, Westminster booked her in to one of the two hotels that they have bought in Hackney.

Then Westminster told her that it was her fault that she had not hired a US lawyer to protect her interests, told her that it was her fault that her marriage broke down, that she was homeless. Told her that it was unacceptable that she should come home and ask for help for her and her baby.

And then Westminster evicted her.

And because the homeless child is now present in Hackney- where Westminster dumped the family- it so happens that social services in a poor East London borough now have to pick up the tab, try to work out how to stop Henrietta's baby being put on the street, or taken into care.

Well we got an injunction over the phone from a High Court Judge. Henrietta and her baby have an overpriced room in a hostel where the linen hasn't been changed, and both of them are eaten alive by bed bugs. The case is ongoing.

Meanwhile Westminster continues to keep its rates low by shipping unemployed people into Hackney and the East End, dumping them on our social services, and getting away scot free, smelling of roses.

Smelling of roses to the well-heeled residents of Westminster perhaps. Get rid of the poor unfortunates, send them to us. To me it smacks of gerrymandering.

Some of you with long memories will remember Dame Shirley Porter, fined millions of pounds unfairly (some might say) for trying to socially engineer the right sort of tenants and the right sort of voters in Westminster, so that we have the right sort of people in a Tory flagship borough.

This week Westminster trumpeted that it was going to give increased priority on its council flat waiting list to people with jobs because they want to reduce their Housing Benefit bill. So millionaire's row will be sending its single parents and its disabled elsewhere.

Under the new dispensation it's respectable to send people like Henrietta and her baby into poor boroughs to enable the rich boroughs to reduce their rates still further. I don't know about you, but I find the naked cynicism predictable and disgusting.
Posted by Nathaniel Mathews at 13:57 3 comments
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Wednesday, 21 September 2011
The Inner City Came Knocking
The inner city came knocking on Tuesday.

I visited St Joseph's Hospice, Hackney, where smokers are encouraged not to smoke outside the door when ambulances are bringing people in, but to smoke at a bench in the garden. There's a fountain. There are flowers growing. There's a guy in a wheelchair with a tube up his nose having a fag. It's lovely.

The occasion was the launch of a social report “Try Being in My Shoes”, by Social Action for Health, a project that sees patients in GP surgeries who have benefits and social problems.

They save GP time, help benefit patients with sturdy paperwork, try and help patients with their anxieties. If the problems become too complex, they refer the cases to local law centres and other legal aid lawyers. Cases are titrated very cheaply, thousands and thousands of benefits income is saved for sick people,the NHS saves money. It's all win win.

The room is packed. Almost 100 delegates turn up. Healthcare professionals, voluntary organisations, people from the Council, youth-workers, we're all worried and angry.

The report dwells on a transformation of the welfare benefit landscape,cuts in the East End of London and sixteen case studies of ordinary people who the project helped.

Mostly the stories are of disabled men and women who face losing their benefits because of the robotic Work Capability Assessment to decide whether they are fit for work. Their experience of the new dispensation was mostly terrifying and bewildering.

One benefit claimant in the case study was diabetic. She was injecting insulin for her type 2 (late onset) diabetes. Her interview with ATOS broke down when the physiotherapist who was being paid for the 20 minute test disbelieved that she was injecting insulin. In his mind a type 2 case couldn't be using insulin like a type 1 case. Well, my partner has exactly the same condition, I could have told them.

Another patient will have to go on public transport for the test, as the DWP no longer sends doctors to visit the seriously ill. Even if the person is recovering from a heart attack or is agoraphobic. So she says she won't be able to go. She just can't cope. If she doesn't go they'll fail her, but if she does they will discount her disability because she managed to reach the interview, and most-like fail her too.

Vicky Hobart, an expert in public health (“The science and art of preventing disease, prolonging life and promoting health” Winslow 1920) leaves me in no doubt that people have been living longer in Hackney over the last 10 years, and makes me worried that with these cuts people will be dying sooner.

50,000 people will lose civil legal aid in London , more than 5.000 will be in Hackney. That's a 64% cut in Hackney. Nationally 6,000 children will lose legal aid, and 70,000 youths (18-25).

Hah! We got off easy! In Liverpool 10,000 people will lose legal aid!

“Riots are what happens when the inner city comes knocking, and we're afraid to listen.”

Dianne Abbot MP was quoting more or less Ian Duncan Smith, a Tory MP and former party leader with a zeal for welfare reform based on some serious minded study of inner city deprivation, the causes and effects.

The riots in Hackney are Banquo at the feast. The elephant in the living room. The totally bloody obvious.

Today also the inner city began to knock.
Posted by Nathaniel Mathews at 13:24 0 comments
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Thursday, 8 September 2011
The Small Society
Sam is a bank manager who lost his job in the recession. He owns a house and has debts, we're talking tens of thousands. Pretty soon he's in court facing the loss of his home. His family might be on the street tonight.

He comes to the duty solicitor for help, half an hour before his hearing. It so happens we can help. We can ask the District Judge for an adjournment so that Sam can get a chance to restructure his debts. Creditors will often be reasonable when they see you can't get blood out of a stone, and the District Court has extensive powers where no agreement can be reached.

Samantha lives on an estate a stone's throw from here. She has kids too, and lives on survival benefits. She too owes money for a benefit overpayment of thousands, that is being clawed back at £10 a week. When you're living on the breadline that can make a huge difference.

Here again we can do something. We can ask the District Judge to give us time, and make an offer of £5 on the repayments.

My hope is that once Sam and Samantha are back in court again, we will have done deals with their creditors, repayment schedules will have been renegotiated over a longer time-scale, and two families will keep a roof over their head.

That is what rocks my boat, day after day. Keeping people in homes, and off the streets. What's more, Legal Aid pays us to help these two families, regardless of class and colour.

Actually, if the Legal Aid Bill goes through, this won't be true .

In the new Bill I'm allowed to tell the benefit authority that Samantha can only spend 48 p a week on shampoo, but if I have incontrovertible proof that she doesn't owe the money at all, my hands are tied.

Even if I know that I could persuade the benefits authorities that they have misinterpreted the regulations, the words are not allowed to leave my lips. Knowledge of the benefit regulations will no longer be funded by Legal Aid, because the new regime will be so easy to use, so transparent, that knowledge of the law will be an expensive inconvenience.

Put baldly, the Coalition has specifically removed any process invoking welfare benefits legislation from Legal Aid funding, because it's so pure and simple any fool can learn it, apparently (the regulations take up volumes).

The Government will however allow debt work to continue where, as in Sam's case, he is at risk of losing his home. Why it will not fund benefits work in identical circumstances can only explained in one way- class. Presumably the Tory Legal Aid minister, Jonathan Djanogly (known to one and all as "Jingle-Bells") wants to keep the home-owner vote, and isn't interested in people on estates who are not likely to vote for him anyway.

The effect of this will inevitably be that in the future Samantha will likely have a suspended possession order made sooner, be more likely to default, and be evicted in less time than before. District Judges in Hackney will bend over backwards to help families, within the law, if there is a prospect they can work themselves out of a hole. Yet without benefit advice many will fall down the drain, and District Judges must above all keep the machinery of Justice moving on.

It is alarming to me that this year already there has been a 17% hike in homeless people accepted by the Council (think of how many more are turned away). The recession and Housing Benefit cuts are already hitting home. Think how bad it will get once the Legal Aid Cuts start.

If the Bill passes Sam and Samantha have both been bamboozled. For charities like mine could close, and no-one will be left to help either of them.

In Hackney, 64% less people would lose a service, that's over 5,000 people. In Liverpool, it's 80%. For God's sake, are these people trying to cause riots by social engineering, because if I was a mad scientist, this is how I would start.

Our society isn't looking very big now. It seems very small. But we only need 83 MP's to change this Law, so please send them a letter, an e-mail, a tweet, a Wells Fargo pony mail by God!
Posted by Nathaniel Mathews at 13:42 2 comments
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Thursday, 1 September 2011
40 years
It took this country 40 years to build a network of Law Centres.

In the late 60's and early 70's we copied the US and set up charities in barber shops and empty office space. We had weird hair, might have worn bell-bottoms, and listened to the Rolling Stones.

We forced slum landlords to toe the line, we bailed out wave after wave of women striking for equal pay. The Notting Hill Riots happened and the laws got better. Racial equality and sexual discrimination laws were passed, and that helped.

Jimmy Hendrix altered the electrical guitar forever.

In the 80's and 90's Law Centres mushroomed. It was found that giving poor people legal rights that could be enforced massively improved their social outcomes. I mean, what's the law for unless the underdog has a voice too?

I spent some time in Slimelight, painted bone white, wearing rubber and lace. Chrissie Hynde, Souxsie Sue, Kurt Cobain.

In the naughties we had human rights law. The right to a fair trial. The right not to be tortured. Respect for the home and family. Common decency arguments. What's so un-British about that?

In the tweens they're shutting us all down. All the basic advice for people who haven't got the right papers.

The new crime and legal aid bill will destroy us. Social welfare law as a discipline will become almost extinct. Housing, family, benefits, immigration, all dumped.

I'm not just cheer-leading for Law Centres. The legal aid safety net is woven of private firms, Law Centres, CAB's. All of us will be affected, but most of all the blow will fall on poor people facing acute problems who will have nowhere to turn to.

It's not too late. At the third reading of the bill we need 83 MP's to change their vote. If you have any faith in the idea of justice, common decency and fair play, please write.

It took this country 40 years to build something right. In 2 years it will be destroyed. Whatever your musical preference, please stick up for Law Centres and Legal Aid.

Posted by Nathaniel Mathews at 14:08 0 comments
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Friday, 19 August 2011
Illegal Evictions- It's Poverty Stupid!
Ben is perfectly likeable young man in a shared house who has been paying his rent and is looking for work, which is a bit tough to come by right now. An almost complete stranger beat him up on the street and made him homeless.

The thug came to their house, entered their home, evicted them onto the streets and changed the locks . I call him advisedly a thug, for this was no bailiff, enforcing an order of the court here. Here was a landlord who couldn't be bothered to use a method which was relatively quick, easy, cheap and legal.

Ronnie and Bill have had their ups and downs. They're from Europe, work all the time, take care of an old man from Uzbekhistan who has been crippled by a stroke. Bill has too much to drink and hits Ronnie. He spends 3 days in the nick, so he hasn't got wages. Ronnie gives the landlord the money in her purse.

The thug turns up and pushed the stroke victim onto the street. I call him a thug advisedly. But yet again, he is the landlord. A lazy landlord, with no time for law.

At a time when unemployment figures are shooting up, even Germany has growth in the toilet, and a remarkable thing is happening.

In a usual year I may get one illegal eviction. In the last two weeks I have had four. It may be that this sort of criminal activity happens all the time, and I miss it, but after 17 years working here my bush telegraph is tired, but there. It reminds me of what social welfare law is for when I see it happen.

Landlords are suddenly chucking their tenants onto the streets. Without going to court. Without doing the things that the Council Advice and Options Service would recommend, to make sure that the process is legal.

I am frazzled. On the day that we get a re-entry order against a very big housing association, the Pembury Estate burns a vehicle or two. Then when I check online I am told by the Prime Minister that the causes of the break-down of law and order is “criminality pure and simple.”

Recently our Prime Minister qualified his reasoning. He indicated that bad human rights lawyers were "twisting and misrepresenting human rights in a way that has undermined personal responsibility" which apparently is exerting "a corrosive influence on behaviour and morality" which was the cause for the riots. Assuming there was a cause.

So.

It seems that by going to court and getting a widow who had been bamboozled onto the street into her home, I am contributing to the lawlessness on Lower Clapton Road. So silly of me, why didn't I think?

Why is it that landlords have, in many cases, taken to behaving like thugs? Is it criminality pure and simple? I think not. It's Poverty Stupid!

Sorry mister Prime Minister. I will try to fight the illegal evictions that are happening. One at a time, all the time. The good ship Legal Aid will not founder upon your watch, I'm hoping, although the signs are not good. Someone's got to keep law and order round here!

Posted by Nathaniel Mathews at 15:00 0 comments
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Monday, 15 August 2011
Peace March
The big police officer with the sandy beard is down from Norfolk. I ask him how many people there are marching and he's not sure. “This is a bit bigger than we're used to” he jokes.

We conclude that about 1,000 people had started in Dalston Kingsland and arrived in front of Tottenham Town Hall.

It started off quite small in Gillette Square, a stone's throw from the famous stand of the Turkish and Kurdish shopkeepers against thugs and looters. People kept arriving. You know, people.

Cameras circulate, looking for stories.

A white lad who must have been about 15 said he thought setting fire to shops was wrong, and also he had found it hard working for nothing for 3 weeks and then being told at the end of it that he had no job.

An Englishman with a beard talks in Spanish trying to explain why he thinks social deprivation in pockets of the richest city in the world might have been caused by economic problems.

A Kurdish woman in a black t-shirt participates in an organisers meeting where it's assumed that this is a peaceful march, and they agree on sensible rules.

One minute of silence is observed, more or less. Waves of hush settle on the crowd for the dead, the 6 people killed so far. People shout in whisper “Have some respect!” The crowd silences .

Then we march off. North to Tottenham.

We march only two miles, but when you're shuffling very slowly your feet hurt. It's the museum shuffle, a young woman tells me, and an old man confirms.

The best chants are all about rhythm. Oghie Oghie , Aye, Aye Aye!

The best of the chants were “Keep our kids in youth clubs , not in Jail!” Go on, try it. The next best was “The bankers are the looters, Give our kids a future!” Better rhyming.

At the front of it all were children with flowers. Dozens of cameras glided like insects.

The worst of the chants were “Stop the Police murderers, disband the police force!” Well yes, if we disband the police we know that all murders will not have been caused by the police, because there are no police. I suspect there would be more murders without the police, but then, who'd be counting?

Finally as we approach Tottenham Town Hall we get on message. "Give our Kids a future" is the rallying cry. Some locals look apprehensive, but others clap.

And we get there. And people of good sense speak. And a young Afro Caribbean woman speak and and says “Is there Love”

And we say “Love”.

Damn, I'm going to turn in my cynic's card and sign up to be a hippy.

Although we were carpeted with cameras, almost no mention in the media the next day. Well, the "Morning Star." And in the Sunday Indie an article by David Lammy, MP for one of the worst affected areas, has a picture of the adorable kids with flowers- and a caption saying it was from an anti English Defence League march in Telford. It seems good news is no news, and adds weight to the view that it's only when riots start happening that serious attention is given to inner city deprivation.

On the way home I stop to talk to a grizzled police officer at London Bridge. Turns out he's up from Folkstone. “This is a bit bigger than we're used to” he jokes.

Posted by Nathaniel Mathews at 15:06 0 comments
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* ▼ 2011 (43)
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+ "We're all Potential Benefit Claimants" : Jenny
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+ The Small Society
+ 40 years
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+ Illegal Evictions- It's Poverty Stupid!
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+ Transparent Like Bullshit
+ London Burns
+ There Is Rope, Or A Chord, That Binds Us All Toget...
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+ Human Rights- British as Sausage and Chips
+ Skating towards Perdition says Jonathan Djanogly
+ St Valentine's day massacre for Legal Aid?
+ 7 Days to Save Legal Aid. Things I wished I'd said...
+ The Broken Of Britain: Cuts List
+ Legal Aid Activists in Hackney Town Hall
o ► January (7)
+ 3 Old Men
+ Wrong-headed, Wicked or Dumb?
+ On the Dole- Catch 22
+ Lobbying MP's
+ Gone in a blink
+ A Ballad for Child J
+ The Case for Legal Aid

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Gerrymandering Homeless Children

2011-10-01T13:57:00.000-07:00

Henrietta left her council flat when her husband got a job abroad in Las Vegas. It seemed like a logical choice at the time. They were both going to make it big.

For a while everything was good. Her husband had a dream job, they were going to have a baby.

But when the child came along their relationship crumbled. Some men can't cope with proper responsibility. Having a real baby, shitting and grizzling is stressful- and some men can't take it. I guess they think of their dicks as a magic wand that has no payback.

When their marriage broke down, when her husband stopped paying for housekeeping for his kid, when she didn't have diapers or food, she realised that this man was no good for her or her baby, so she went home to the UK.

She stayed with a friend in Westminster, poshest of boroughs. After six months of ignoring her when she came asking for help and advice, Westminster booked her in to one of the two hotels that they have bought in Hackney.

Then Westminster told her that it was her fault that she had not hired a US lawyer to protect her interests, told her that it was her fault that her marriage broke down, that she was homeless. Told her that it was unacceptable that she should come home and ask for help for her and her baby.

And then Westminster evicted her.

And because the homeless child is now present in Hackney- where Westminster dumped the family- it so happens that social services in a poor East London borough now have to pick up the tab, try to work out how to stop Henrietta's baby being put on the street, or taken into care.

Well we got an injunction over the phone from a High Court Judge. Henrietta and her baby have an overpriced room in a hostel where the linen hasn't been changed, and both of them are eaten alive by bed bugs. The case is ongoing.

Meanwhile Westminster continues to keep its rates low by shipping unemployed people into Hackney and the East End, dumping them on our social services, and getting away scot free, smelling of roses.

Smelling of roses to the well-heeled residents of Westminster perhaps. Get rid of the poor unfortunates, send them to us. To me it smacks of gerrymandering.

Some of you with long memories will remember Dame Shirley Porter, fined millions of pounds unfairly (some might say) for trying to socially engineer the right sort of tenants and the right sort of voters in Westminster, so that we have the right sort of people in a Tory flagship borough.

This week Westminster trumpeted that it was going to give increased priority on its council flat waiting list to people with jobs because they want to reduce their Housing Benefit bill. So millionaire's row will be sending its single parents and its disabled elsewhere.

Under the new dispensation it's respectable to send people like Henrietta and her baby into poor boroughs to enable the rich boroughs to reduce their rates still further. I don't know about you, but I find the naked cynicism predictable and disgusting.

The Inner City Came Knocking

2011-09-21T13:24:00.000-07:00

The inner city came knocking on Tuesday.

I visited St Joseph's Hospice, Hackney, where smokers are encouraged not to smoke outside the door when ambulances are bringing people in, but to smoke at a bench in the garden. There's a fountain. There are flowers growing. There's a guy in a wheelchair with a tube up his nose having a fag. It's lovely.

The occasion was the launch of a social report “Try Being in My Shoes”, by Social Action for Health, a project that sees patients in GP surgeries who have benefits and social problems.

They save GP time, help benefit patients with sturdy paperwork, try and help patients with their anxieties. If the problems become too complex, they refer the cases to local law centres and other legal aid lawyers. Cases are titrated very cheaply, thousands and thousands of benefits income is saved for sick people,the NHS saves money. It's all win win.

The room is packed. Almost 100 delegates turn up. Healthcare professionals, voluntary organisations, people from the Council, youth-workers, we're all worried and angry.

The report dwells on a transformation of the welfare benefit landscape,cuts in the East End of London and sixteen case studies of ordinary people who the project helped.

Mostly the stories are of disabled men and women who face losing their benefits because of the robotic Work Capability Assessment to decide whether they are fit for work. Their experience of the new dispensation was mostly terrifying and bewildering.

One benefit claimant in the case study was diabetic. She was injecting insulin for her type 2 (late onset) diabetes. Her interview with ATOS broke down when the physiotherapist who was being paid for the 20 minute test disbelieved that she was injecting insulin. In his mind a type 2 case couldn't be using insulin like a type 1 case. Well, my partner has exactly the same condition, I could have told them.

Another patient will have to go on public transport for the test, as the DWP no longer sends doctors to visit the seriously ill. Even if the person is recovering from a heart attack or is agoraphobic. So she says she won't be able to go. She just can't cope. If she doesn't go they'll fail her, but if she does they will discount her disability because she managed to reach the interview, and most-like fail her too.

Vicky Hobart, an expert in public health (“The science and art of preventing disease, prolonging life and promoting health” Winslow 1920) leaves me in no doubt that people have been living longer in Hackney over the last 10 years, and makes me worried that with these cuts people will be dying sooner.

50,000 people will lose civil legal aid in London , more than 5.000 will be in Hackney. That's a 64% cut in Hackney. Nationally 6,000 children will lose legal aid, and 70,000 youths (18-25).

Hah! We got off easy! In Liverpool 10,000 people will lose legal aid!

“Riots are what happens when the inner city comes knocking, and we're afraid to listen.”

Dianne Abbot MP was quoting more or less Ian Duncan Smith, a Tory MP and former party leader with a zeal for welfare reform based on some serious minded study of inner city deprivation, the causes and effects.

The riots in Hackney are Banquo at the feast. The elephant in the living room. The totally bloody obvious.

Today also the inner city began to knock.

The Small Society

2011-09-08T13:42:00.000-07:00

Sam is a bank manager who lost his job in the recession. He owns a house and has debts, we're talking tens of thousands. Pretty soon he's in court facing the loss of his home. His family might be on the street tonight.

He comes to the duty solicitor for help, half an hour before his hearing. It so happens we can help. We can ask the District Judge for an adjournment so that Sam can get a chance to restructure his debts. Creditors will often be reasonable when they see you can't get blood out of a stone, and the District Court has extensive powers where no agreement can be reached.

Samantha lives on an estate a stone's throw from here. She has kids too, and lives on survival benefits. She too owes money for a benefit overpayment of thousands, that is being clawed back at £10 a week. When you're living on the breadline that can make a huge difference.

Here again we can do something. We can ask the District Judge to give us time, and make an offer of £5 on the repayments.

My hope is that once Sam and Samantha are back in court again, we will have done deals with their creditors, repayment schedules will have been renegotiated over a longer time-scale, and two families will keep a roof over their head.

That is what rocks my boat, day after day. Keeping people in homes, and off the streets. What's more, Legal Aid pays us to help these two families, regardless of class and colour.

Actually, if the Legal Aid Bill goes through, this won't be true .

In the new Bill I'm allowed to tell the benefit authority that Samantha can only spend 48 p a week on shampoo, but if I have incontrovertible proof that she doesn't owe the money at all, my hands are tied.

Even if I know that I could persuade the benefits authorities that they have misinterpreted the regulations, the words are not allowed to leave my lips. Knowledge of the benefit regulations will no longer be funded by Legal Aid, because the new regime will be so easy to use, so transparent, that knowledge of the law will be an expensive inconvenience.

Put baldly, the Coalition has specifically removed any process invoking welfare benefits legislation from Legal Aid funding, because it's so pure and simple any fool can learn it, apparently (the regulations take up volumes).

The Government will however allow debt work to continue where, as in Sam's case, he is at risk of losing his home. Why it will not fund benefits work in identical circumstances can only explained in one way- class. Presumably the Tory Legal Aid minister, Jonathan Djanogly (known to one and all as "Jingle-Bells") wants to keep the home-owner vote, and isn't interested in people on estates who are not likely to vote for him anyway.

The effect of this will inevitably be that in the future Samantha will likely have a suspended possession order made sooner, be more likely to default, and be evicted in less time than before. District Judges in Hackney will bend over backwards to help families, within the law, if there is a prospect they can work themselves out of a hole. Yet without benefit advice many will fall down the drain, and District Judges must above all keep the machinery of Justice moving on.

It is alarming to me that this year already there has been a 17% hike in homeless people accepted by the Council (think of how many more are turned away). The recession and Housing Benefit cuts are already hitting home. Think how bad it will get once the Legal Aid Cuts start.

If the Bill passes Sam and Samantha have both been bamboozled. For charities like mine could close, and no-one will be left to help either of them.

In Hackney, 64% less people would lose a service, that's over 5,000 people. In Liverpool, it's 80%. For God's sake, are these people trying to cause riots by social engineering, because if I was a mad scientist, this is how I would start.

Our society isn't looking very big now. It seems very small. But we only need 83 MP's to change this Law, so please send them a letter, an e-mail, a tweet, a Wells Fargo pony mail by God!

2011-09-01T14:15:00.001-07:00

40 years

2011-09-01T14:08:00.000-07:00

It took this country 40 years to build a network of Law Centres.

In the late 60's and early 70's we copied the US and set up charities in barber shops and empty office space. We had weird hair, might have worn bell-bottoms, and listened to the Rolling Stones.

We forced slum landlords to toe the line, we bailed out wave after wave of women striking for equal pay. The Notting Hill Riots happened and the laws got better. Racial equality and sexual discrimination laws were passed, and that helped.

Jimmy Hendrix altered the electrical guitar forever.

In the 80's and 90's Law Centres mushroomed. It was found that giving poor people legal rights that could be enforced massively improved their social outcomes. I mean, what's the law for unless the underdog has a voice too?

I spent some time in Slimelight, painted bone white, wearing rubber and lace. Chrissie Hynde, Souxsie Sue, Kurt Cobain.

In the naughties we had human rights law. The right to a fair trial. The right not to be tortured. Respect for the home and family. Common decency arguments. What's so un-British about that?

In the tweens they're shutting us all down. All the basic advice for people who haven't got the right papers.

The new crime and legal aid bill will destroy us. Social welfare law as a discipline will become almost extinct. Housing, family, benefits, immigration, all dumped.

I'm not just cheer-leading for Law Centres. The legal aid safety net is woven of private firms, Law Centres, CAB's. All of us will be affected, but most of all the blow will fall on poor people facing acute problems who will have nowhere to turn to.

It's not too late. At the third reading of the bill we need 83 MP's to change their vote. If you have any faith in the idea of justice, common decency and fair play, please write.

It took this country 40 years to build something right. In 2 years it will be destroyed. Whatever your musical preference, please stick up for Law Centres and Legal Aid.

2011-08-19T15:08:00.001-07:00

Ben is perfectly likeable young man in a shared house who has been paying his rent and is looking for work, which is a bit tough to come by right now. An almost complete stranger beat him up on the street and made him homeless.

The thug came to their house, entered their home, evicted them onto the streets and changed the locks . I call him advisedly a thug, for this was no bailiff enforcing an order of the court here. Here was a landlord who couldn't be bothered to use a method which was relatively quick, easy, cheap and legal, and take them to court.

Ronnie and Bill have had their ups and downs. They're from Europe, work all the time, take care of an old man from Uzbekhistan who has been crippled by a stroke. Bill has too much to drink and hits Ronnie. He spends 3 days in the nick, so he hasn't got wages. Ronnie gives the landlord the money in her purse.
The thug turns up and pushed the stroke victim onto the street. I call him a thug advisedly. But yet again, he is the landlord. A lazy landlord, with no time for law.
At a time when unemployment figures are shooting up, even Germany has growth in the toilet, and a remarkable thing is happening.
In a usual year I may get one illegal eviction. In the last two weeks I have had four. It may be that this sort of criminal activity happens all the time, and I miss it, but after 17 years working here my bush telegraph is tired, but there. It reminds me of what social welfare law is for when I see it happen.
Landlords are suddenly chucking their tenants onto the streets. Without going to court. Without doing the things that the Council Advice and Options Service would recommend, to make sure that the process is legal.
I am frazzled. On the day that we get a re-entry order against a very big housing association, the Pembury Estate burns a vehicle or two. Then when I check online I am told by the Prime Minister that the causes of the break-down of law and order is “criminality pure and simple.”
Recently our PM qualified his reasoning. He indicated that bad human rights lawyers were "twisting and misrepresenting human rights in a way that has undermined personal responsibility" which apparently is exerting "a corrosive influence on behaviour and morality" which was the cause for the riots. Assuming there was a cause.
So.
It seems that by going to court and getting a widow back into her home, I am contributing to the lawlessness on Lower Clapton Road.
Sorry mister Prime Minister. I will try to fight the Illegal evictions that are happening. One at a time, all the time. The good ship Legal Aid will not founder upon your watch, I'm hoping.

Illegal Evictions- It's Poverty Stupid!

2011-08-19T15:00:00.000-07:00

Ben is perfectly likeable young man in a shared house who has been paying his rent and is looking for work, which is a bit tough to come by right now. An almost complete stranger beat him up on the street and made him homeless.

The thug came to their house, entered their home, evicted them onto the streets and changed the locks . I call him advisedly a thug, for this was no bailiff, enforcing an order of the court here. Here was a landlord who couldn't be bothered to use a method which was relatively quick, easy, cheap and legal.

Ronnie and Bill have had their ups and downs. They're from Europe, work all the time, take care of an old man from Uzbekhistan who has been crippled by a stroke. Bill has too much to drink and hits Ronnie. He spends 3 days in the nick, so he hasn't got wages. Ronnie gives the landlord the money in her purse.

The thug turns up and pushed the stroke victim onto the street. I call him a thug advisedly. But yet again, he is the landlord. A lazy landlord, with no time for law.

At a time when unemployment figures are shooting up, even Germany has growth in the toilet, and a remarkable thing is happening.

In a usual year I may get one illegal eviction. In the last two weeks I have had four. It may be that this sort of criminal activity happens all the time, and I miss it, but after 17 years working here my bush telegraph is tired, but there. It reminds me of what social welfare law is for when I see it happen.

Landlords are suddenly chucking their tenants onto the streets. Without going to court. Without doing the things that the Council Advice and Options Service would recommend, to make sure that the process is legal.

I am frazzled. On the day that we get a re-entry order against a very big housing association, the Pembury Estate burns a vehicle or two. Then when I check online I am told by the Prime Minister that the causes of the break-down of law and order is “criminality pure and simple.”

Recently our Prime Minister qualified his reasoning. He indicated that bad human rights lawyers were "twisting and misrepresenting human rights in a way that has undermined personal responsibility" which apparently is exerting "a corrosive influence on behaviour and morality" which was the cause for the riots. Assuming there was a cause.

So.

It seems that by going to court and getting a widow who had been bamboozled onto the street into her home, I am contributing to the lawlessness on Lower Clapton Road. So silly of me, why didn't I think?

Why is it that landlords have, in many cases, taken to behaving like thugs? Is it criminality pure and simple? I think not. It's Poverty Stupid!

Sorry mister Prime Minister. I will try to fight the illegal evictions that are happening. One at a time, all the time. The good ship Legal Aid will not founder upon your watch, I'm hoping, although the signs are not good. Someone's got to keep law and order round here!

Peace March

2011-08-15T15:06:00.000-07:00

The big police officer with the sandy beard is down from Norfolk. I ask him how many people there are marching and he's not sure. “This is a bit bigger than we're used to” he jokes.

We conclude that about 1,000 people had started in Dalston Kingsland and arrived in front of Tottenham Town Hall.

It started off quite small in Gillette Square, a stone's throw from the famous stand of the Turkish and Kurdish shopkeepers against thugs and looters. People kept arriving. You know, people.

Cameras circulate, looking for stories.

A white lad who must have been about 15 said he thought setting fire to shops was wrong, and also he had found it hard working for nothing for 3 weeks and then being told at the end of it that he had no job.

An Englishman with a beard talks in Spanish trying to explain why he thinks social deprivation in pockets of the richest city in the world might have been caused by economic problems.

A Kurdish woman in a black t-shirt participates in an organisers meeting where it's assumed that this is a peaceful march, and they agree on sensible rules.

One minute of silence is observed, more or less. Waves of hush settle on the crowd for the dead, the 6 people killed so far. People shout in whisper “Have some respect!” The crowd silences .

Then we march off. North to Tottenham.

We march only two miles, but when you're shuffling very slowly your feet hurt. It's the museum shuffle, a young woman tells me, and an old man confirms.

The best chants are all about rhythm. Oghie Oghie , Aye, Aye Aye!

The best of the chants were “Keep our kids in youth clubs , not in Jail!” Go on, try it. The next best was “The bankers are the looters, Give our kids a future!” Better rhyming.

At the front of it all were children with flowers. Dozens of cameras glided like insects.

The worst of the chants were “Stop the Police murderers, disband the police force!” Well yes, if we disband the police we know that all murders will not have been caused by the police, because there are no police. I suspect there would be more murders without the police, but then, who'd be counting?

Finally as we approach Tottenham Town Hall we get on message. "Give our Kids a future" is the rallying cry. Some locals look apprehensive, but others clap.

And we get there. And people of good sense speak. And a young Afro Caribbean woman speak and and says “Is there Love”

And we say “Love”.

Damn, I'm going to turn in my cynic's card and sign up to be a hippy.

Although we were carpeted with cameras, almost no mention in the media the next day. Well, the "Morning Star." And in the Sunday Indie an article by David Lammy, MP for one of the worst affected areas, has a picture of the adorable kids with flowers- and a caption saying it was from an anti English Defence League march in Telford. It seems good news is no news, and adds weight to the view that it's only when riots start happening that serious attention is given to inner city deprivation.

On the way home I stop to talk to a grizzled police officer at London Bridge. Turns out he's up from Folkstone. “This is a bit bigger than we're used to” he jokes.

Transparent Like Bullshit

2011-08-10T13:22:00.000-07:00

Transparent like Bullshit

I see a woman with three children and a disabled husband.

She has been living in emergency accommodation since April, after her eviction, and has duly completed all the Housing Benefit forms required. She has two letters from Housing Benefit saying the rent is being paid for, and that they are sending the rent to her old landlord. This is an extreme waste of money as she is not living at her old home any more.

Another letter informs her that the agency housing her is on the point of evicting her, as she owes 5 months' rent.

I call the Council, spend an hour or so explaining our client's problems, and am told that no public money has been misspent, the file was suspended all the time. I am told that the letters that she has received were “generated in error by the system”.

I see a young woman who was trafficked into the UK for domestic slavery as a child, who after a 7 year wait has the right to be in this country. She's being evicted onto the street.

She has two letters . One gives her refugee status, one discretionary leave to remain. I'm no immigration lawyer, but when the official calls you and asks you to destroy one of the letters, my alarm bells go to ultra red.

Legal Aid cuts are aimed at the work that local charities do, because they say, there is no need for knowledge of the law for our work.

I say to you, there is a chord that binds us all together. A chord of wisdom and respect, letting the elder and the child speak, letting us all speak. Justice will not be silenced. Yet if social welfare law is extinguished, ordinary people with extraordinary problems will be diddled right and left, and all of us will suffer.

London Burns

2011-08-09T11:09:00.000-07:00

Val, a committed and likeable legal executive is virtually in tears by Monday. Her house, off Haringey High Road is ground zero for the riots that exploded over the weekend.

Violence unfolded suddenly and unexpectedly on Saturday . One minute she was observing a small crowd outside Tottenham Police station who had assembled to demand answers over the death of a young man at the hands of the police, in circumstances which are still murky. Val then noticed a low-flying helicopter, and wondering vaguely whether there was a search on for a lost child,
she left to pick up a prescription from the chemist. By the time she got there the shop was being looted, and she ran for home.

All night she heard screaming and yells, and she got up sleepless to see her neighbourhood transformed into a moonscape. Beautiful listed buildings recently restored with great love (Haringey has more of these than anywhere in London) had been torched. Shops were looted, an entire row of mixed shops and residential building had gone up in flames, a neighbour's car had been burnt out.

The 89 year old barber who cuts her partner's hair was staring forlornly at the shattered windows of his tiny shop-front, where he seems to have worked time out of mind.

The staff are shocked, clients keep piling in and the work won't do itself so we get on with it.

Round one o'clock word gets round that there's an organised meet in Hackney. Kim and I go out to do an early post run and half the businesses including the Post Office have their shutters down. Shoppers and staff are drifting about aimlessly.

We elect to stay open in a frenzy of emergency applications, notices, pleadings, letters and client interviews- just another day at the office. Suddenly the TV's got live coverage of police lines 200 yards from our doorstep.

As buses close Red Pepper rescues us five in a car and gets us south of the river, like desperadoes catching the last stage coach out of Utah. A young woman on my train closes her phone and looks worried. “They've closed down the buses in Peckham.”

And so all night stuck to the screens. Burning cars in Lewisham and Hackney, an inferno as another carpet shop went up in Croydon, most unforgivably, a building in Peckham, again a shop with flats above. The police cordon in Lower Clapton Road stands right next to Marina's, greasy spoon of the world, and our local diner.

Today has been surprisingly quiet. A few broken windows in Mare Sreet and Narrow Way, about half of blinds down, no broken glass or burned out anything in sight, and 100 volunteers turn up outside the Town Hall to help. By lunchtime 90% of everything is closed though, including the banks.

Commerce goes out of Hackney with a whoosh, and London holds its breath.

No jobs, slashed benefits and services, rising cost of living, scrapping the lifeline EMA allowance that helps poor kids stay on in college and off the streets, yanking the price of a university education out of people's reach and dreams, it's not difficult to find the potent ingredients that made up this fire-bomb; the only question all along has not been if, only when.

Only a fool or a criminal would take pleasure at the sight of our communities burning down their workplaces,job-centres, and ancient buildings. Only a blind man could not have seen this coming somewhere down the road.

There Is Rope, Or A Chord, That Binds Us All Together.

2011-08-03T13:22:00.000-07:00

There is rope, or a chord, that binds us all together.

I have 200 cases and yet with the holes in my pockets I shuffle past
Bums begging a smoke at the beginning of the month on London Bridge,
I look into the rushing water, and my bag grows light, so easy to see the papers flying,
Gulls settling on the waters. Alone at last, at the Fridge

I might have kissed a bonny boy; I did once, but if I am lying, fire
Burnt the silver roads into your heart. The drum beat slows and rests a breath
Great heart, weave your threads lightning quick or we are lost,
Bitter tears others may weep, yet silence shall ever treat you gently.

With fire of reason shall our liberties be restored, loving kindness at the last
May lead us to an old man in rags who once spoke wit and wisdom, a bag of tricks, fire in a chestnut.

Cancer: Who gives ATOS?

2011-07-27T13:36:00.000-07:00

Annie holds a letter from a NHS doctor telling her that she has cancer of the thyroid gland. If you place your hand on your throat you can feel it, just about. It's where your thumb is.

She waited over a year for proper medical help and did not find it from the NHS, who failed to make a follow up appointment for 13 months. Then she went native (as it were) and went back to her homeland of Lithuania. The Lithuanian health authorities removed her thyroid gland toot sweet. They prescribed 4 courses of radioactive iodine. They also diagnosed her partner with unsuspected liver cancer, and he passed within a week.

She comes back to Blighty because her children live here. They have been in school for years. She worked in a factory. She may feel more British than Lithuanian.

The deeply flawed Work Capability Assessment fails my sweet client. The so called doctors hired by ATOS (A French Company hired to fail as many benefit claimants as possible) ignore her NHS letter, and airily concludes she has only hyperthyroidism- an over active gland. Something that no GP would confirm without tests, but hey, what the heck, when you're slashing benefits for the work-shy we're all in it together.

The Tribunal doesn't list her case for a year, and then they fail to send her the papers, so the hearing has to be adjourned again.

The day before the next hearing I see her, and she tells me the cancer has spread to her lung. I start to grind through the 50 or so questions required to gauge her ability to work (how long can you watch TV before you lose the plot? Can you touch your toes when you bend down, and if you get dizzy touching your shin, who cares?). But it just seems wrong. She's too sick to engage.

“I feel tired and dizzy all the time” she says.

We go to the Tribunal and we win. Because the British sense of fair play allows very seriously ill people to bypass the WCA.

Today we won, but tomorrow we throw cancer victims onto the field of chance. No more Legal Aid for seriously ill people, because the DWP is or will be so transparent that no benefit claimant will need legal advice ever again. And just in case our plans don't work, we'll sack the lawyers beforehand in case this makes us look bad.

What makes me boil with rage is reading the Express and and it's ilk swallowing the Government lie that only one in 14 people claiming sickness benefits deserve to do so. 40% of claimants who appeal win. Those who have legal advice and representation are even more successful. Even the man who designed the WCA says it's not fit for purpose. But no, journalists in national newspapers are prepared to peddle unthinkingly the old lie; if you're too sick to work you must be lazy.

This is a tale about a woman stricken by cancer. When given a choice between an ageing health service struggling under a Stalinist dictat and a former communist block country she chose Lithuania. She worked hard in this country, she paid her taxes. Tomorrow she's on the rubbish heap.

Hackney Mona Lisa

2011-07-17T15:26:00.000-07:00

When I was a young lawyer, green as glass, the building opposite the Town Hall in Hackney was empty for months, then years.

Then it was occupied for 3 months by a couple of dozen people who wished to set up a youth and cultural centre. A building that had been empty for a long time was suddenly full of hippies doing creative projects. A young idealist met weekly with the Council to lobby for emergency cultural funding that was never going to materialise, or a peppercorn rent for the space.

They lined the grim concrete with blankets, cooked lentils, grumbled about the future of the nation, and snarled at a sinister man who wished to buy a bride to sort his immigration problems. It was 94, and the young people knew the economy was crap then, as it's crap now.

In the fullness of time they were evicted. Yet before they left they did organise an exhibition of artwork, and a mural appeared on the north wall facing the Narrow Way of a woman traced in white on old dark London brick; is she screaming; speaking, laughing? We did not know.

For years she was allowed to remain and enigmatically question us, Hackney's own Mona Lisa.

Years passed and the building lay empty. Then the Ocean Centre was launched, and a sound studio, performance space and a decent cafe opened up. The moneys were European regeneration, to do up the Town Hall square, but also ate up sums that had previously been earmarked for charities. How we moaned.

There was a bright side however. I well remember steaming down on a weekend in my goth clothes (velvet coat-tails, doc martens and a bit of mascara, since you ask). A Pop were singing, I was dancing, and love never dies urged me on.

The idealists of yesteryear would have been proud. This, it seemed, was the project they had wanted 10 years previously, when nobody else was interested. Sadly it didn't last long. Somehow the Ocean ran out of cash, and before we knew it had closed again.

Mona Lisa is gone now, with the squatters and artists. The building was empty a few years more. Now its a Weatherspoon's.

Kicking Squatters Pt I

2011-07-11T13:04:00.001-07:00

“Legal Aid cuts for squatters” the Evening Standard trumpets, and that sounds like a good thing. In the public eye squatters are dubious unwashed people who pop into your home the moment you pop out for a pint of milk and the Daily Mail.

In reality the amount of Legal Aid spent on squatters is minniscule. Allow me to explain.

Squatters come in different sizes and shapes. That horror of the Daily Mail, the gypsies/drug users who move into your home while you are on holiday can be removed instantly by the police. Upsetting incidents reported recently are down to poor police training, different police priorities, and lazy sensationalist journalism. So no Legal Aid spent here ( though those same taxpayers are wasting their newspaper money on misleading information.

Professional squatters in my experience tend to be oddly sweet young people, often muddled and with a real or metaphorical dog on a string. They occupy long term unoccupied premises, they set up artistic exhibitions. They try to make friends with their neighbours, with varying degrees of success.

They know precisely what the rules are, and know when they will be evicted. Heck, they're smarter than I am about court procedure. An interim possession order would put them on the street in days. Still no Legal Aid, except the very occasional half hour checking the legal paper work and usually confirming that all was in order and they would have to leave.

Very occasionally, perhaps three times in 20 years of practice one might comes across someone who has been allowed to live unchallenged somewhere for decades, and may have acquired adverse possession (squatters' rights). The idea that people or communities may sometimes acquire land by right of occupation goes back to Roman times. I see no reason to interfere with the arrangements as they are.

Finally, the criminalisation of squatters means that far from cutting Legal Aid costs, these would rocket, as minimal spend on civil legal process is scrapped and expensive criminal legal aid kicks in. That's what I mean about Jingle Bells. Clueless!

The failure by many journalists in the Standard/Independent group to challenge government spin on Legal Aid cuts is a matter for dismay.

Battered Tenants

2011-07-08T14:32:00.000-07:00

Denise has a good job working for a Council. She has a council flat in another Council, and there's nothing wrong with that. She pays the bills, raises her son Jamal.

The problem is that Denise is joint tenant in her flat with her volatile brother Derick. Derick gets busted for fights in pubs, has to wear a tag. Moves his girlfriend and her 2 kids in and out of their 2 bed flat, slaps people around sometimes.

Pretty quickly Denise realises this isn't going to work. She asks to be moved. The police write a letter of support. Nothing happens. After 4 years of this her landlord suddenly moves her to a hostel, then moves her back after 3 days.

One day Derick goes for her and teen age Jamal gets in the way. Now Denise and her son sleep in a friend's living room. They've been there for 15 months. She sleeps on an air mattress so as not to spoil the sofa. Jamal is hanging on by his fingernails.

Her landlord strings her along, ignores it's policies on tenants with domestic violence issues, forces her to pay the rent arrears her brother has racked up in exchange for vague promises that never get fulfilled.

We're a charity so we help her out for free, but government cuts in family and housing legal aid mean soon we won't be able to. Soon getting civil legal aid will be like winning the lottery ticket- except that what you get may be an impersonal voice in an office across the country, where you can never look your lawyer in the face and judge the value of the advice she is giving you.

So much for protecting victims of domestic violence.

The New Rachmans

2011-07-04T13:38:00.000-07:00

God Bless John Snow and Dispatches. On this 4th of July a major TV broadacaster looks at Landlords from Hell.

Criminals masquerading as charities brazenly explaining to our undercover reporter how to evict a tenant ilegally- and get away with it. Migrant workers stuffed into garden sheds, children living with mould and damp, the flagrant abuse and dishonesty is al to believable in my experience.

The chilling truth about Meridian Trust- one of the landlords featured- is that up to 80% of their income is Housing Benefit. That's right chum, it's you and me that's footing the bill.

There are extensive powers to regulate landlords. Most of them lie with Local Authorities, yet on average they prosecute less than one landlord a year. To do so costs money, and with the cuts in

Caroline has been living in a council flat for three years. Her property is rife with mould. Poor design ensures that her flat is not well ventilated. Basically, if she kept her windows open all winter the problem might be better, so she has to pick between pnemeunia and allergies produced by mould spores when deciding what's best for her kid.

Caroline's support worker Ricky puts it like this. "Your'e there half an hour and it's like trying to breathe underwater."

The Council's Enviromental Health Officers can't compell their own employer
to carry out works, but they can serve a "shaddow letter" on them, as if they were a private landlord, and (in effect) shame them into taking action. Not surprisingly, this never seems to happen.

Britain's housing stock is ageing and inadequate. A thicket of laws set up tto guard against this are not enforced by cash-strapped Councils.

What a good time to cut Legal Aid for housing cases!

Netmums Nightmare

2011-07-02T13:33:00.001-07:00

I wish to complain.

Pauline is in Court facing loss of her home. She works for the Ministry of Justice, and is being made redundant tomorrow. She has 2 teen-agers, one 12 and one 16. The youngest a girl, the oldest a boy. Netmums everywhere know this is a nightmare.

She has been to see 3 firms for advice. She finds them all cocooned. Before she can get advice she must have up to the date documentation within the last month. Although 9 out of 10 documents that she bears prove her income, she has no Child Benefit letter within the last month. She says, perfectly logically, that she has the same number of children. She would have noticed if she had had another one, or lost one of the little darlings.

Not good enough. Common sense does not prevail.

All legal Aid Lawyers are locked down in terror, it seems. Unless we have 12 or 15 documents proving beyond doubt that when we present our bill in 6 months we will be paid in 12 , why waste the effort?

Why?

Because of this. I was on duty in court speaking to a real woman who has worked from the moment that she left school. And has lost her so called comfy job. Who has 2 children. The Judge accepted that, and she will not lose her home.

We got a result, but the reality is that the Legal Aid system is broken already. Our paymaster the Legal Services Commission is cowed and demoralised, and lawyers are frightened of exercising powers to grant Legal Aid in emergencies because in 2 or 3 months time they will be second guessed and the Legal Aid will be cancelled.

People who need emergency services they are legally entitled to are not receiving it, Pauline might have lost her home.

I wish to complain.

Jingle Bells

2011-06-24T14:15:00.000-07:00

And so to Parliament.

Government LA Minister Jonathan "Jingle-Bells" Djanogly came to visit us on Wednesday. His brief- to justify almost complete dismissal of 5,000 responses against his bill.

He is surprisingly young, but then for me the doctors and policemen suffer this also. He told us one of the priorities of the cuts was to protect fundamental rights that should be protected by the state.

Then he cut education law unless the child has a disability. I thought education was every child's right.

He tells us that another priority is savings. Thus all employment law will be cut. He thinks people should rely more on trade unions. A first this, a Tory minister advocating trade union membership.

Fierce John from the Mary Ward Legal Centre (a proud charity dating to Victorian times) asks him why appeals in Employment cases, which by definition are legally complex should be cut. After all, the employer has a lawyer. Why leave a carpenter or a cleaner unprotected against the might of the state or corporation?

Jingle-Bells tells us that there is no funding for representation in employment hearings anyway. We tell him that's wrong, in the Lower Tribunal that's true, not in the Upper. "But that's a tiny amount" he blurts out.

OK Jingle Bells, if tiny, why cut it? He doesn't seem to know.

Jingles tells us that another priority is value for money.

A comrade from Shelter points out that its no use defending a possession case where a client isn't getting their housing benefit unless you can do something about this. Jingle- Bells assures us that he is trying to make the benefit system so efficient that there will never be a need for lawyers again.

Pull the other one Jingle Bells.

A very senior legal executive asks why funding is available when children are taken to Europe, but not Wales. The Minister looks more than usually confused., smiles a bit shily. A young civil servant (see above) explains that the reason is the reason.

An Irish lawyer asks about the impact of lack of funding for disabled clients. Jingle Bells assures us that Equalities Protection will be in place. “But disabled people will lose benefits just like other people” he adds magnanimously.

Oh Jingle Bells!

Finally I lose my temper. A straight answer to a straight question if you please. Last month we forced a Council to pay for 18 months of Housing Benefit and preserved the home of a family with a disabled child. Yesterday we stopped an eviction, and prevented a family being flung onto the parish. Tomorrow who'll do our job?

Jingle Bell blushes, and gives a speech about this government's deep commitment to the voluntary sector. I'm not sure he knows what Housing Benefit is for. Or the voluntary sector.

Under the reforms British children or children born in this country will have no funding to apply for leave to remain. Their mothers and carers can't work and can't claim benefits. Family life clearly is no great priority for Jonathan.

Linda Lee from the Law Society is dismayed and disappointed.

Jonathan assures us that 5,000 replies to his consultation were carefully considered. And then discarded.

Oh Jingle Bells!

Snot true

2011-06-19T15:11:00.000-07:00

Snot ran off my client's nose as the Judge labelled her case speculative and made an outright possession order. She will lose her home.,

She has a bold faux-gold stud in her nostril. I feel a huge sympathy because she has been put under the microscope this last six months.

She came to this country aged 9, now she's 24. She has 2 kids of her own. Legally she isn't allowed to work. Social workers smile at her and cook their books.

She owes four thousand pounds to her landlord because the same social worker who took her kids away forgot to pay her rent.

I stand and explain all the information to the Judge and she says my case is speculative.

Judge, clean up your act. They're already taking away Legal Aid, but I won't put up with this .

The Reader Survey

2011-06-14T15:08:00.000-07:00

Thank you dear friends.

We in the legal professions have sent 5,000 suggestions to the government in response to their consultation on Legal Aid cuts, which may be ignored- what are the chances? This month the axe almost certainly falls on Legal Aid.

Wild figures are cast about . The figure of 70% funding cut to charities who practice Law (for God's sakes!) are Government projections. Law Centres and charity would face closure across the country.

I would never have gone out on Facebook or Twitter unless I thought this mattered. It matters.

I started this blog specifically because I wanted people to realise what we may lose- and also to share stories about daily experience working in Hackney.

Feedback has been very encouraging. This month Frontline passed the 3,000 visits mark, and people regularly visit from as far afield as Russia and Australia.

What there has been very little of is feedback on the Frontline site. So I am sometimes left wondering whether these numbers are simply artefacts of the internet, rather than real people.

What have you found interesting in Frontline? What would you like to hear more about (and what less?). Please leave some comments on Frontline's page this week, so I can plot another 3,000 visitors.

Terry Pratchett/ Life doesn't get much better.

2011-06-13T15:35:00.000-07:00

Went to my job in my No2 Jacket, now moved to No1 (pale grey). Didn't expect Court so I wore black jeans, a little old, Doc Martens , dove grey shirt, tie.

Went to court anyway, did the business, found myself after 7 ½ recorded hours of work and 12 hours at work sitting at a bus stop in Lower Clapton waiting for the 48 bus. My emergency supplies are Camel Lites, any newspaper and an emergency book.

Emergency book is Terry Pratchett's “Moving Pictures”, light and funny, but not one of his best. I'm eyeing the rain when a young man stops.

“What are you reading?” He asks. He must be about 16 to 17. I'm white with my pony tail and balding, he's black with marvellous hair and a love for books.

We talk about Terry's best, which includes “ Reaper Man”, “Wyrd Sisters” and “Guards Guards!”

He shakes me by the hand and goes on his way, and I say to myself, life doesn't get much better than this.

Is Legal Aid falling to pieces allready? Ask Violet

2011-06-09T14:33:00.000-07:00

A barrister phones me. Violet is a smart dedicated barrister of impeccable socialist principles in the ways that matter. She knows and cares about the clients. She argues smart law.

She wants to know when we can have a Legal Aid Certificate. Without this none of us is paid.

“Yes” I say, “I think it's just arrived. Sorry about the delays” - at present the LSC are processing correspondence from 20 April (we're talking emergency applications here). Papers get lost. Requests for reviews of batty costs decisions take a year. Emergency legal aid runs out after 28 days and you spend hours trying to secure emergency cover.

Hours of my time are spent listening to Vivaldi's “Four Seasons”.

Meanwhile, if our papers are sent back after 12 days because the client's name isn't spelt out in BLOCK CAPITALS underneath the signature on p12 of one of the forms (I am not joking) they limit your cover to 5 days because you did not submit the forms "properly completed".
Explanations of "good reason" receive short shrift e.g my 70 year old secretary had to go to bail her schizophrenic alcoholic daughter out of police/hospital? UH UH! Not good enough.

My partner had a heart attack and my world went to pieces? Still not good enough.

The sad thing is the staff at the LSC hate it too. These are bright friendly people who want to work, often are legally trained, and are located all over Britain.

Meanwhile, soon we won't be able to grant Legal Aid any-more, so when a homeless family come in we'll sign the forms, send them off and tell mum with tots to come back in 11 weeks or so, if they're lucky.
What are we supposed to do? Kick them out onto the streets?

Violet. The Legal Aid system is taking a heck of a hit already. But I recommend to you the Parliamentary inquiry by the Haldane Society of Socialist Lawyers, and Young Legal Aid Lawyers which you may find here http://bit.ly/kRJC4i.

Picketting the Supreme Court

2011-06-07T14:03:00.000-07:00

It was stifling hot when we set out to be Legal Aid Super Heroes on June 3^rd, Heron and Wendy and I.

Me in my blue jeans, denim jacket 20 years old covered with pagan symbols , Heron the smart scouser carries our banner furled up. Wendy, 30 years in the movement no longer has to use a walking stick for her injury.

Full of good intentions we arrive before the Royal Courts of Justice in the Strand. Then the crack team of litigators that we are, we realise we need to be in front of the Supreme Court in Parliament Square. Duh!

Hop a Taxi then realise that my Mum who doesn't have a mobile phone and has come up specially from Dorset will also be going to the wrong place.

Parliament square is seething with humanity. Hordes of rubberneckers choke the pavements. We arrive on a small island in front of a Very Important Building.

In a sea of honking traffic we hear a shadow minister, a peer of the realm, the leader of a venerable legal charity. They have bull horns but you can only hear every second word. We set up our 18 foot banner in blue plastic with “I Love Hackney Community Law Centre” and “Save Legal Aid.”

Suddenly everybody starts chanting . “Save, save, save Legal Aid!” We get moved up to the front. An acapella band comes on, four piece with Sound off for Justice tee shirts. They sing I Fought the Law and the Law Won, they sing about human rights. A client's little girl starts to do the Twist, and we are all amazed.

The band leaves, We should leave too. No. We stand our ground. People come up we haven't seen in ages. Photos are taken. We catch up on old news. More and more people come up.

A very tired woman who has been working at Basildon Court turns up. We sing the Internationale very badly indeed. We go home.

Heron lost his wallet then found it again. And incidentally, I found my Mum. In June they will tell us about Legal Aid cuts. At least we've said our piece.

From bad to verse

2011-05-30T10:41:00.000-07:00

We have some stamps, for this our thanks

We walked along the river banks for charity

You raised a grand for us, we're grateful, see

Consider the poor volunteer, unpaid, unloved

And over here, h/she gives sweat and love and grief,

To take a statement, write a brief, learn on the job, and then

They have no cash for lunch, poor them.

A bowl of soup, a healthy snack, how much would a fiver set you back?

Listeners be of good cheer, buy lunch for a volunteer

http://uk.virginmoneygiving.com/fundraiser-web/fundraiser/showFundraiserProfilePage.action?userUrl=hackneylawcentre&isTeam=true

Scary Judges Super creeps

2011-05-19T11:47:00.000-07:00

The first time I ever I faced a Judge I was on my own, high in the Thomas Moore building.

I was a 3 month trainee solicitor with a legal document ripe for execution. We were in the attic of a sprawling Alice in Wonderland wedding cake of a building called the Royal Courts of Justice, in the Strand.

I very callow and young, and there was a scary gnome sitting behind a huge desk with a big shock of white hair like Rumpeltstkilskin.

“Mr Mathews “ boomed the gnome “Are you a carpenter or a joiner?”

That floored me. I was still trying to get to grips with being a clerk learning about legal thingies. I cast about me wildly. Outside there was a scaffold, and maybe he thought I had broken in by mistake. I could be free of this. All I had to do was tug my forelock and step out the window.

“The pen Sir.” And then it was so blindingly obvious. Behind my ear there was a pen.

Then the gnome kindly approved my motion. I remained almost speechless. He told me that in Chancery the court writes up the orders, and I was out of there.

The gnome was fierce to get my attention, yet kind to teach me. That was a kind Judge. Others have been less kind, and less wise.

The Stamp Walk

2011-05-14T08:56:00.000-07:00

Bella tells us the stamps have all gone

And it's true, all our office supplies

Have vanished like mist in the morn

And on these things our good work relies

We have notes to take but no pens

Our staplers are battered and trashed

We have letters to write but no tapes

And a terrible shortage of cash

Friends we come hats in hand to you all

We beg you to have no misgiving

On Monday we walk for free legal advice

Please visit Virgin money giving

http://uk.virginmoneygiving.com/fundraiser-web/fundraiser/showFundraiserProfilePage.action?userUrl=hackneylawcentre&isTeam=true

Could Clark Kent ever become the US president?

2011-04-29T14:12:00.000-07:00

A media storm (oh how I love them) is troubling Fox over issue 900 of Superman, which features the man of steel flying to Tehran to protect peaceful protesters against the tanks of President Ahmedinejad, then returns home to inform the authorities that the is renouncing his US citizenship, because he does not wish to be seen as an instrument of American foreign policy.

Needless to say many of my countrymen are incensed by such clear evidence of a communist takeover of the lamestream media. Said one "The liberal, America hating scumbags who now run DC Comics are just adding another feather in their cap with yet more anti-American culture and tradition jihad. F--k 'em," wrote one commenter. "This is why I don't go to movies or even rent anymore. I'm not making the left loons of Hollywood any richer to support their campaign of American hate," added another.

A real comic book scholar would know that the DC universe periodically recasts its characters in alternate histories, moreover that in one adventure Ka-El fell not on the American prairie but on that of Siberia, and grew up to battle for the mother country against a sick capitalist called Lex Luthor who has gained the supreme office of the land of the free. Thus, the conspiracy could be proved. But no, they're just not prepared to do their homework.

But really,although my first inclination is not to lend succour to those of my fellow Americans who now spend 24 hours a day watching Fox TV, fondling their rifles and stuffing their necks with freedom fries, I am afraid that there is something more sinister afoot. I don't want to go all birther, but I do have to ask, does Superman have a US citizenship to renounce? The evidence is not encouraging.

1 He is an illegal alien, having arrived secretly by spaceship. Although in times gone by the US was built by successive waves of immigrants, a feeling has arisen in places like Arizona that enough is enough. Witness the defeat of legislation proposing to confer US citizenship on children of illegal immigrants from places like Mexico if they carried out a tour of duty in the armed forces or obtained a college degree. It seems that neither heroic sacrifice for the security of the nation nor improving the wisdom and economic potential of your country is sufficient. It seems difficult to justify an exception for the man of steel.

2 He was informally adopted by 2 American citizens who, we must presume, had to secure a forged birth certificate. We know this because had the authorities been alerted of the landing of a baby in a space ship Clark Kent would have been big news, and would probably have been taken into care by social services. His secret identity would certainly have been blown. If Clark Kent has managed to acquire a passport which seems kind of pointless when you can fly to Tehran faster than an ICBM, this will have been obtained by deception and thus is null and void. The implications of social security fraud and unlawful employment by this mild mannered reporter would certainly scupper his run for office.

3 He was not born on American soil. Although like myself a person may gain American citizenship when born abroad if one parent is American, that person may never be President. Another much loved man of steel, Arnold

Schwarzenegger, has been governor of California but can never become president as he was born in Austria. Similarly Ka El was born on the planet Krypton. Rules are rules. Although if Clarke were to declare himself a Republican, it is possible that a constitutional amendment could be arranged.

4 He's not even human. Only humans can be US citizens. Are there any US citizens that are cows? No, thought not.

All I can say is Donald Trump eat your heart out. I got to the evidence first. And I can come to but one conclusion. Superman must be deported.

Bonfires and Angels

2011-04-18T14:35:00.000-07:00

I'm standing at Old Street Roundabout with a really heavy briefcase. Paper is made of wood, and I'm carrying around at least three bonfires. My head hurts and I'm having a fag, waiting for the bus.

I worry about the case I'm on in in half an hour for. A young man in an unsteady job helping people in the gym is behind on his rent. He's so badly paid he would be better off on the dole. That's a harsh thing to say to any young person.

A young woman walks up to me. “How are you” she says. Her face is open and friendly. “Not so bad “ I say, but already my panic response is going. She knows me, but I don't know who she is. Must be a former client.

“I just wanted to tell you how much you helped me get back on my feet. Thank you, you really did a good job for me” says the woman, whose face I remember but who's name escapes me.

I'm a bit flustered because I have a brain that needs helpers when I see a face. It's rude to ask the client to remind you of the case papers. If I could remember which writ, which notice of possession, which warrant of eviction, maybe I'd stand a chance. She's still smiling.

“Look , I'm off to work, but thank you” she says. Then the bus arrives. My guardian angel gets on the bus and flies away.

Suddenly, the day becomes a little brighter.

Let us give thanks for volunteers

2011-04-12T14:29:00.000-07:00

Archibald and Amy came to us to give their time for free.

Like many talented young postgraduates coming into the marketplace they found no jobs, so they decided to volunteer for their local charity. Archie should be on a proper training contract so that he can qualify as a solicitor after 2 years. Amy is a brilliant single mother who has qualified as a barrister, but can't get a place in chambers.

In spite of their money worries they decided to volunteer for us, and soon they helped an ailing Law Centre turn itself around. They're on the phones one moment, talking to drop in clients the next. Reading papers, filling out funding forms, gathering witness statements and lecturing housing officers, rarely do they have time to sit still.

I could give special mention to Archie's careful interviews of dozens of neighbours that helped a family member keep his flat after his grand-dad passed away. Or Amy's clever skeleton arguments, or the people who turn up every day who she talks to and then makes appointments for.

The fact is that Amy & Archie give no more and no less that up to 100 volunteers a year who contribute acts of kindness.

The Big March

2011-03-28T15:01:00.000-07:00

Saturday morning at the Royal Courts of Justice I was buzzing for Justice. Rule 1 in our legal system is what is in the interest of justice? Having drunk 2 coffees, anything was possible.

200 Gurka's were camped on the tiny traffic island around the RAF Church. Men with distinctive hats and rows of medals accompanied by hardened army wives in colourful costume who sang and danced.

We were going to a march, and march we did.In moments we were sepparated from the Justice for All banner.

It took an age, standing with our banners, waiting for it all to kick off. A sea of humanity swamped the embankment Ancient banners were displayed, all scarlet and tasselled. Union and local party banners , the design over 120 years old in some cases. Pictures of the founders in their long Victorian whiskers.

Then a cloud of green and pink balloons was released and we were off. Marching under the bare London trees. Except we just stood there for 40 minutes.

We moved, in starts and stops. Behind us was a group of teenagers from Dorset sporting green bandanas and kerchiefs, campaigning against EMA cuts and fee hikes. Bless, I thought, aren't they sweet. Then I overheard one lad who couldn't have been a day over 16 tell his mate how this was the third march he's been on. Hell, I should be asking them for tips!

The firebrand spoke thus “Oaaaaaaghhhhhyiiii We hate Tories we hate Tories we are the Tory haters! Many people hated the Tories, which is not surprising. Then the cutest group of kids overtake us with their mum. They have face paint and are chanting "No ifs no buts, no public job cuts."

Soon we moved on. Then we stopped. And then we became aware of the Anarchists walking next to us with their lip piercings and their rat tail hair and every one in a top hat. Top hats moving in a straight line along the Thames. Shortly afterwards the Love Tank glides by, a sort of float playing Bob Marley.

Then I collected my senses and we began to move and on my left was the London Eye. Then we inched along for 2 hours. 2 hours turned into 3. Our legs hurt, out knees ached. Then nothing is moving at all. Then Michael Mansfield QC arrives and everyone's shouting, save, save Legal Aid!

We see dinner ladies, dentists and dieticians. Union banners from all over the country, and local activists with hand made signs. My favourite of these was "Bankers of the world ignite", but running a close second is the butler complete with tray and tea pot and "Teapots against kettling." Special mention for the kid with "My parents are making me carry this sign."

Then we're into Westminster Square. We speed up and soon we're past Downing Street where we all slow down and hiss and boo. Firebrand is speechless. “He's probably at Chequers” someone points out.

We hook a left at the Horse Guards, some protesters gurn at the young man in 19^th century horse armour, personally I think that's mean. Marchers go for a leak and firebrand sounds off. An actress for East Enders gives us a cheer.

We're back in the march, around Green Park .We're all hoarse and we can't carry our banner any longer. A Hackney Turkish group comes up behind us, and sings the Internationale in their own language, A Union walks past and it has the words to the Internationale but we're to hoarse. And tired.

We walk by some banks that have broken windows, but more often paint bombs, defended by worried policemen and policewomen. The Evening Standard reported that damage worth millions had been done. A few thousand maybe.

And then we're there.

Hackney Has Fans in Australia

2011-02-25T13:10:00.001-08:00

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Human Rights- British as Sausage and Chips

2011-02-19T10:08:00.000-08:00

The overwhelming vote by MP's against implementation of a ruling by the European Court of Human Rights ("ECHR") to give prisoners the vote is only OK as a symbolic gesture to demonstrate the ultimate power of Parliament. However some of the speeches were a disgrace and muddied the waters in a populist media campaign that is ill informed and ill intentioned. If they don't now move on and compromise it will be an embarrassment and a disgrace.

The ECHR is not the same organisation as the European Economic Area ("EU") , which is fundamentally a customs and trade treaty. Instead the ECHR is an international Court set up after the war with one aim in mind- to enforce a commonly agreed standard of basic human rights.

Thus screaming "Europe!" to frighten people is either ill informed or wicked.

After the war Europe deliberately constructed a framework to ensure that Nazism and totalitarianism could never happen again. British and French Jurists were extremely influential in drafting a list of rights which includes the right to life A2 , the right not to be tortured A3, the right not to be discriminated against A14 and the right to a fair trial A6, as well as the right to respect for your family, privacy, correspondence and your home A8

As British as sausage and chips, surely?

One MP called the ECHR "A kangaroo court". Really? A court where respected judges including our own are sent to try and agree on tough cases over basic human values that unite us?

David Davis, co-sponsor of the bill uttered the word "lawyers" like he meant cat sick, and explained that until the lawyers came along there hadn't been a problem. Not being a lawyer became a badge of honour, and scarce 22 MP's dared to speak for the idea of obeying the law. How Jack Straw could sponsor the bill and defend the ECHR frankly I don't understand.

Banning lunatics and criminals from the vote only dates to the 1870's, and banning women was always traditional. Now women and people with mental health problems have the vote, and the idea is floating that some prisoners should get to vote too.

Strangely the story became that fat shark lawyers would bleed the government dry unless Parliament voted for the reforms, and therefore it voted against it. But then, this is a kangaroo parliament.

The Express and other newspapers have been shrieking at the prospect that 90.000 people who have been banged up (among the highest in Europe may I add) might get the vote. Something entirely irrelevant in electoral term in a nation of over 60 million people. Yet one of the functions of time in prison, and one of the cheapest ways of encouraging a prisoner to engage with the idea of how they will behave once they are released into society, is voting.

Frankly, I think many won't bother in line with national trends, some will add a desolate vote to Nick Griffin and other nutters, but some will start to come to their senses and will benefit from being able to make small gestures

Once again the Express is in paroxysms of delight today when a High Court Judge has rejected damages claims by frustrated prison voters as un-British and unconstitutional. What the Express fails to understand is that only the British Supreme Court is able to pass judgement on the conflict between our Courts and the ECHR. Thus the case will make its way up the Court Appellate process. Express notwithstanding.

Ill intentioned and ill informed, newspapers whip up clouds of confusion because lazy journalists know there is no point investigating and reporting the facts. Their editor will rip their research to pieces and impose the line their editors' paymasters dictate.

My worry is that our Judges, the best in the world, will bottle it in this media storm. But I'm a small cog in a big wheel. I hold my breath and have my hopes.

Skating towards Perdition says Jonathan Djanogly

2011-02-16T14:59:00.000-08:00

“I would dispute that we have a roller skate legal service in this

country. I think it’s actually demeaning to the professions and to the excellence of the quality of service that most people receive [from Legal Aid].” Tory legal aid minister Jonathan Djanogly told legal bigwigs on 7.2.2011.

As a moderately depressed geezer working at the coalface this seemed like quite cheerful news. We'd all been worried about cuts of £350 million and 50% cuts to Civil Legal Aid services.

Oh wait, to paraphrase the rest of Jonathan's japes at the Westminster Policy Forum, therefore he's going to proceed to cut £350 million and ensure that 500,000 people will lose access to Civil Legal Aid.

So that's all right then. Cuddly Jonathan thinks that although we don't yet have a roller skate legal system, we should have, and this will make working in legal aid less demeaning.

Government consultation on massive legal aid cuts closed at 12 pm St Valentine's Day, as Chancellor Ken Clarke received thousands of e-Valentine cards asking him scrap his plans to cut legal aid.

On 31 January 90 lawyers, charity workers and union members met with clients to plan a fightback at Hackney Town Hall. Already in just 14 days 1,000 Hackney residents have signed petitions to save Legal Aid. 500,000 people will lose free legal advice for problems such as debt, housing, and family, which is half of the number who are receiving civil legal aid now.

Local resident and human rights barrister Liz Davis, chair of the Haldane Society said that since 1949 Legal Aid had been the fourth pillar of the welfare state, along with the NHS, free education and the benefits system. The cuts would slash access to basic rights.

A member of the public who came to the meeting with her disabled mother said that she was a refugee who had been helped by Legal Aid when they were both homeless. She now has a university degree and is working as a dietician with Council services to improve school meals. “I wanted to give something back” she said.

12 Courts will close over the next 2 years in London. Nationally 3,000 jobs will be lost, but it's not about the jobs.

We put in a petition with 232 signatures by real people. People who put a mobile phone number and a post code, and a scrawl. Mums with prams and kids, pensioners apprehensive about meeting a lawyer but hoping they may get help, worried and confused people from many walks of life with threatening letters and court papers they don't understand, smart people we only have to give a little knowledge to who go away and sort out their problems for themselves, frightened teenagers who have been trafficked as maids, then thrown out when they became 18, broken old men stuck low by drug problems and decades of homelessness and heroin, elderly people crippled by cancer, blindness, renal failure, who should be talking to doctors not lawyers, volunteers coming in day after day to help us run our cases.

232 people said No to LA cuts.

I'm sure there's more out there.

St Valentine's day massacre for Legal Aid?

2011-02-15T15:21:00.000-08:00

Government consultation on massive legal aid cuts closed at 12 pm St Valentine's Day, as Chancellor Ken Clarke received thousands of e-Valentine cards asking him scrap his plans to cut legal aid.

Local resident and human rights barrister Liz Davis, chair of the Haldane Society of Socialist Lawyers said that since 1949 Legal Aid had been the fourth pillar of the welfare state, along with the NHS, free education and the benefits system. The cuts would cripple services that Hackney residents depend on.

A member of the public who was there with her disabled mother said that she was a refugee who had been helped by Legal Aid when they were both homeless. She now has a university degree and is working as a dietician with Council services to improve school meals. “I wanted to give something back” she said.

12 Courts will close over the next 2 years in London.

We put in a petition with 232 signatures by real people. People who put a mobile phone number and a post code, and a scrawl.

7 Days to Save Legal Aid. Things I wished I'd said before it's gone.

2011-02-07T15:46:00.000-08:00

I went to a meeting of court users. I'm a lawyer, that's my job. A professional in human misery I am.

Once a year your local court will meet with the people who use its services most often, and try to find out how best taxpayers money may be spent.

You would meet housing officers, civil servants, lawyers working for the Councils and other social landlords, legal aid solicitors and charity workers , as well a private firms. And Judges. All fighting each other but trying to agree.

One housing officer said that too much legal mail was directed to a building that was knocked down 10 years ago. Sadly the files with the information for stopping this might have been inside the building at the time. We scratch our heads a bit about that one. Mail will be arriving for years to come.

The Judges have a straw poll about legal bundles. It seems mostly double sided bundles are ok, but unless you can deliver your bundles in person using a lever arch means that the bundles get crunched in the post, and crunch the Judges' fingers. Not a good way to win your case.

15,000 jobs are cut from the Justice payroll. 4,000 staff will be cut from the Courts, and London will lose 12 Courts. Let's hope our big society's going to be a bit fairer.

I wish I could have said to the Judge's faces look, do ye think that cutting off all these basic legal services will improve people's lives? But it's not their fault as they don't hold the purse strings.

What I was thinking was 500,000 people will lose advice for common legal problems. I want to jump up and down and shout SAVE LEGAL AID!!!! But like a lawyer I hum and haw.

7 Days to Save Legal Aid. Things I wished I'd said before it was gone. Don't make my mistake.

The Broken Of Britain: Cuts List

2011-02-06T13:35:00.000-08:00

The Broken Of Britain: Cuts List

Legal Aid Activists in Hackney Town Hall

2011-02-03T13:33:00.000-08:00

100 Friends of Hackney Community Law Centre met on 31.1.11 to launch a local drive to halt Legal Aid Cuts and Court Closures.

Liz Davis, an experienced social welfare barrister and Chair of the Haldane Society reminded us that in 1949 when Legal Aid was created it was viewed as the fourth pillar of the welfare state, along with the NHS, education and a universal benefits system. At the time of its creation the Legal Aid system was capable of providing a service to 80% of the population (the other 20% being deemed to be sufficiently rich to pay for their own).

In recent years the proportion has fallen to 26%, and proposed cuts would mean that only those who were “virtually destitute” would receive a service if it still existed. Up to 50% of civil legal aid would be wiped out, and 500,000 people will lose a service

A young Somali woman who was present with her disabled mother spoke movingly from the floor, explaining how Legal Aid had saved them from being deported and led to them receiving refugee status. She had recently completed her degree and was working for her local council because she “wanted to put something back.”

A pensioner who used to work for the Court staff described a case concerning a woman who had been released from hospital to a police cell where she died. Her daughter was unable to obtain Legal Aid at the Inquest when the police, NHS and various other agencies all had their own barristers. Thus she was not allowed to ask questions effectively.

Legal Aid cuts would fall disproportionately on women, children, the elderly and the disabled, in other words the most vulnerable. One young lawyer in a Legal Aid firm said that clients who received services were ordinary people stuck in extraordinary circumstances. Often a small amount of help when a family was facing a crisis turned its future around.

12 Courts are to close in London over 18 months, 4,000 jobs could be lost to Court and Tribunal staff, and 11,000 in the Prison and Probation services. This shutting down of the legal system does not look promising.

There are concerns that with substantially less lawyers able to help extraordinary individuals in sadly all too common and ordinary difficulties, the Big Society we are apparently working in will become meaner and smaller.

100 people doesn't sound like very much, but each of these people knows 10 people who know these savage cuts are barmy. Ask those 10 people to sign up to http://www.justice-for-all.org.uk/Take-part/Love-legal-aid and pass on the message.

3 Old Men

2011-01-30T09:50:00.000-08:00

Dealing with piss stained old men and blind people can be disconcerting. Someone else should have to do with that. Perhaps a nurse or a social worker. For many this is a common reaction. For us in legal aid it can be another day at the office.'

Bruce is Australian and has been living here for 30 years. His father was born in County Down then emigrated. He's 80 now, and the house he lives in is falling to pieces around his ears.

Claude is legally blind and his kidney's packing up. He too has lived here off and on for 30 years, and has many children living in this country, who rarely visit him.

Ole was an accountant in Lagos, who came to London and married, and fathered children. The relationship broke down. Shortly afterwards he had a massive stroke.

All have a common legal problems, for all have no papers or have exceeded their leave to remain.

All lived in horrible conditions. Bathtubs filled with piss? No problem. Kitchens like a bomb site? What else. Stairs falling to pieces, basements filled with junk, I went and looked. No water, no electricity. It all stacked up. These places were worse than third world slums.

As a decent society we have doctors, social workers and housing officers to assist the infirm and the disabled. Unfortunately these three old men have allowed their immigration status to lapse decades ago, and although two have paid tax and national insurance, and one had an English grandfather, they are not entitled to any benefits, housing or, in Claude's case, renal dialysis that he was on the point of receiving.

What they do have at present is a right to receive free legal advice helping them to apply for leave to remain in the country, which may also be their right, or which might be granted on discretionary compassionate grounds. However under government proposals this right to advice will be removed, on the grounds that the procedures are transparent and simple. This of an immigration ministry compared recently by a senior Judge to a poorly run whelk stall.

Readers may have varying levels of tolerance in the abstract for foreigners who come here and then find themselves in a mess for whatever reason. But surely we can agree that when three people who between them have lived here almost a century need help, we should give it to them.

I explain to Claude that the reason he won't have a lawyer any more is that the system is so easy to deal with. His sightless eyes bulge in outrage. “That's rubbish!” he bellows, and signs our petition.

Wrong-headed, Wicked or Dumb?

2011-01-25T13:08:00.000-08:00

We attended the all party parliamentary inquiry on Legal Aid today. The theme was, what impact will Legal Aid cuts have on MP's dealing with a constituent in a surgery?

Up to 60% of the basic maths in the impact assessment of cuts may be flawed. This is not promising.

CAB research on welfare benefits advice shows £1 spent in LA saves £8.80. Yet £22 million in cuts will deprive 13,000 people of a service, and stop test cases. That's one way of saving money, I suppose.

Cuts in immigration are fair because applications are "simple" - yet the House of Lords describes the legal process applied by the Home Office as "applying policy to dogma that Kafka would have recognised." As another Judge put it “I would ask rhetorically, is this any way to run a whelk stall?”

75,000 people will loses debt advice at a time when the Money Advice Trust thinks that the need for services caused by the recession has not even peaked.

There are only two possible ways to describe the Government's proposals; wrong headed or wicked.

Wrong headed, because any MP who stopped to think about the impact of these cuts would realise that they were hurried and foolish. Wicked because any MP who takes stock and votes for them anyway is doing something wrong.

Plain dumb, because when we close down all the voters are going to come to you, and set up camp in your surgeries.

On the Dole- Catch 22

2011-01-18T12:38:00.000-08:00

I don't deal solely in miserabilism, funnily enough. The reason I joined up to the 4^th service (behind the NHS, the schools, and the benefits system) was a sense of optimism and adventure. A sense that with the small assistance of my brain, and our common courage, we might achieve something for those who have fallen into a trap.

Maria is a smart Polish kid who's lived here 15 years. She has a kid now, is married, pays taxes. Her daughter is in school. When she turned up at the stall in Dalston market where she'd worked for 5 years she found it closed and her boss bankrupt.

The next day her husband, who has settled status but no job, moved out. Men!

The Benefits Agency advised her to claim Income Support as a single mother, who shouldn't have to work, then refused her because she stopped signing on. She claimed Job Seekers Allowance and signed on, and was refused because the job she had been doing had never been registered with the Home Office. Catch 22 at its finest.

Child Benefit was refused. Tax Credits were refused. Housing Benefit was refused. She faced eviction, but she contacted us and we fought back.

We got her her Child Benefit, her Tax Credits, her Housing Benefit, and appealed the withdrawal of JSA. It took over a year for her appeal to be listed, but this month we represented her and she finally won. It turned out that the Department of Work and Pensions has been using an out of date version of a statutory instrument on Eastern European nationals – known as the Accession 8.

Charla has had health problems and can't get the Social to call her back. She's been on Employment Support Allowance- a disability related benefit, but at an interview with an official she did badly, and her benefit was withdrawn. Her doctor doesn't think she's fit to work, but a non medically qualified official thinks otherwise.

Charla appeals, and the rules say she should get her benefit until the appeal is heard by an independent panel that includes a doctor. But her payments stop, and for three weeks she has nothing.

Charla is allowed to apply for a Crisis Loan in this situation- in effect an advance on her benefits. But if she manages to get though to the busy call centre she is told that she will be called back, then no-one calls. Or maybe they do, but her phone has run out of power or credit- as she has no money.

She comes in to the Law Centre, we phoned and she gets some money for the week end. Her ESA is reinstated pending appeal.

Legal Aid cuts would make this work impossible, because the government line is that claimants can get all the advice they might want or need from public officials- yes, those same functionaries who have refused them. Failing that the courts and tribunals- yes, those same agencies who put up signs informing members of the public that staff are not qualified to give legal advice. It seems that the system runs so well that there is no need for lawyers.

I ask them why they felt it necessary to come and see us. “Nobody listened to me until I got a solicitor” says Charla. Maria is even more dismissive. “They treat you like an animal until you get a solicitor”, she says.

So walking down the stairs from the tribunal the rain has lifted, the sun is shining, and Maria has her benefits. She's smiling.

“I wish I had a solicitor” says a guy coming out behind us.

Lobbying MP's

2011-01-16T12:01:00.000-08:00

Went to Parliament on the 12^th to support J-4-A's campaign launch. The plan was to invite your local MP to come and visit about the loss of civil legal aid for 500,000 people. That's slashing the number who can get this advice by 50%.

The House of Commons is a wonderful victorian gothic building that looks part cathedral, and part wedding cake. It seems timeless, and yet it looks like its melting. If you walk past the policemen who are careful to ensure that everyone has an umbrella (which is rather sweet), and walk through the metal detectors, you will arrive in a lovely gallery, with paintings and statues.

300 lawyers and clients came to the meeting. 6 MP's and 1 Baroness spoke common sense (as well they might). Sadiq Khan spoke for legal protection of vulnerable people, and Andrew Slaughter told me that the legal aid cuts could mean that tens of thousands of people will lose funding for their tribunal cases.

My organisation's 2 MP's were too busy to meet us, and I met my local Streatham MP fleetingly, but his researcher came and spoke to us.

A number of clients spoke movingly of their experiences, including a mother and her little girl who had found themselves homeless and were helped to find somewhere else to live by Shelter.

At least 1 government MP, including the member from Westminster came to speak with his constituents. And when asked the question why are you cutting LA, said “I know you give a lot of good practical advice, but why do you need to have lawyers?”

Well, let me see, perhaps because of the hundreds and hundreds of Acts of Parliament, statutory instruments, European directives, International Treaties, Codes of Guidance, Ministerial Letters, Local and National policy documents which define the everyday social and economic rights of your constituents? Not to mention thousands upon thousands of cases in the Lower and Upper Tribunals, County Courts, the High Court, Court of Appeal, Supreme Court, and the European Court of Human Rights?

It seems that we have a lot of work to do. We must persuade legislators that we're not all just tea and sympathy. Although why anyone should begrudge a sympathetic service with the odd cup of tea is beyond me.

Gone in a blink

2011-01-12T12:52:00.001-08:00

Jeanette was almost catatonic when we saw her first. Suffering from intense Post Traumatic Stress Disorder and profound depression, she was terrified of strange men, and she also heard voices.

Oh, and she speaks French and a little English.

A victim of a bloody conflict in Africa, she had been imprisoned, tortured and brutally gang raped before she managed to escape and make her way to our shores. When she arrived we put her in prison for travelling on false documents. Then we chucked her out on the streets.

Her first asylum appeal was botched so she had no right to be housed or fed. Sofa surfing or sleeping rough, she was frequently assaulted and had her meagre possessions taken.

Her speech was slurred and she stared straight ahead. Psychologists call it lack of affect. Looking like she isn't really aware of anything else around her.

Telescoping a couple of years into a few lines, we got her housed by social services, got a new asylum claim in, supported her long term counselling by experts in the treatment of torture victims, went to court several times, and got her her legal status.

At which point she was evicted again.

Telescoping again, we referred with submissions, and she was refused by the Council on the grounds she hadn't been traumatised enough. Spoke to doctors, wrote letters, kept a roof over her head, studied legal cases, forced the DWP to pay her benefits, and finally the humane review officer conceded that she had suffered enough.

Finally she will have the right to be housed.

And finally the thousand yard stare you get if you're an athlete, a soldier or a war victim has begun to soften. “Ca va?” I say to her, and she smiles at my accent, and I think there's a bit of a twinkle in her eye.

This, I say to myself, is what it's all about.

Under funding cuts proposals, 90% of what we just did would not be funded. The Government's position appears to be that as all Jeanette had to do was deal with various government departments,who obviously make the right decision all the time (You what!), and thus she has no need for legal advice. So nobody would do it.

We have managed to deploy up to a hundred volunteers a year in some years. We're experts at getting people to pitch in for free, but the reality is that these cuts could mean there would not be enough gas to prime the pump and we would close.

The reality is that by cutting Jeanette's right to advice on her entitlements thousands of women in the future will fall further into oblivion. But let the reasons given by our government be at least honest.

The advice that all our Jeannettes have received should be professional, independent, competent and legal. It cannot be said that the various solicitors, barristers, doctors, volunteers and citizen witnesses that have been paid and given time were involved in anything other than legal proceedings. We didn't just do tea and sympathy. We did our jobs.

Let our government say that in a time where bankers have made us bust we can't afford proper services. Don't say the services we provide are anything other than expert.

30 years of giving free legal advice, gone in the blink of an eye.

A Ballad for Child J

2011-01-11T02:24:00.001-08:00

"Child J, a 5 month old baby, died in the summer of 2009, when his mother, Ms K, jumped from a third floor balcony, holding him in her arms. She also died. An inquest subsequently found that she had taken her own life and that Child J had been unlawfully killed."

As the official learning inquiry observed, "Ms K was therefore without any source of income as a result of these [benefit] decisions." She raised this with a range of individuals and agencies, as well as pursuing formal appeals processes. Her General Practitioner wrote to the DWP.

Ms K was a French national. She came to England with her sister some years ago. She worked a number of jobs, thus paying tax and NI, and studied. On holiday abroad she became pregnant . Having worked and studied in Britain for years she stopped at around the time she was to give birth, then ran afoul of the benefit system.

I don't know the lawyers, social workers, doctors or benefits officials in this report, which is a document of open record. However the benefits decision shows that all of the professionals involved had to deal with a very bad set of rules regarding the rights of European mothers.

The trap Ms K fell into is called being a foreign woman, in a sense. But here is how it's done.

When a European national who has a job and pays tax and NI over here is injured in the job or loses work and signs on, he is entitled to benefits. When a French or Polish woman does the same then falls pregnant , she is advised, by the smiling and well intentioned clerk that she should claim Income Support, because as a woman about to give birth she shouldn't have to sign on.

Then if the mum isn't British they send a habitual residence test form. And then when they find out that she isn't working, she loses her benefits at the exact same time she's bringing a baby into this world. Because after ceasing to sign on, she ceases to be a worker. An generally speaking, unless she is a classified as a worker, she loses her benefit rights.

According to one argument the reason for the withdrawal of benefits is because pregnancy is not an illness, and thus if you cease work, you voluntarily take yourself out of the labour market.

This was an unusual Serious Case Review. "Child J was a well loved baby, who received exemplary care from his mother, until the point of his sudden death." A sudden depression was thought to have been a possible cause of these deaths.

The Panel judged that the stresses arising from being refused benefits would have been the most significant factor in precipitating the development of mental illness. So the sudden onset of depression, or perhaps suicidal lack of feelings of self worth was caused by money worries.

Not lawyers, not doctors, not social workers could manage to save Ms K or her son, Mr J, a loving mother who picked her kid up and walked into statistics. None of us managed to stop it.

It would be mean and cowardly for me to claim that I could have secured a different ending to this case. I didn't know the people, although I recognise the patterns. Social services can do more to help financially while benefit claims are going on, but try to save the money for emergencies. Lawyers struggle with a slow bureaucracy, and confusing and contradictory legislation.

I'm pretty sure that either the legislation is wrong , or the interpretation of those rules is wrong, or the level of service that Ms K received was wrong, because otherwise we must be living in an unhealthy society.

Here's one thing I know for a fact. If the cuts to Legal Aid proposed go through future Ms K's will not be entitled to legal advice. So what I think about what we could have done worse, or better, will soon become obsolete.

She paid taxes, she spoke French and English both. She had an English baby. I hope you're all as ashamed as I am.

The Case for Legal Aid

2011-01-05T14:10:00.000-08:00

As we watch rolling demonstrations by student activists who keenly feel that something precious is slipping away before our eyes, we are encouraged to become distracted. When is it ok to break a window? Since kettling is at present legal, or maybe not, when and how should it be used? Is it OK to deface the Rolls Royce owned by the next symbolic head of state in a symbolic way, and why is it almost OK to throw and egg at someone sometimes, but not not poke a woman in the stomach with a stick?

These are important questions, but we shouldn't lose sight of the fact that these are symptoms of a disease, by which I mean not an illness caused by a microscopic organism, but a a sense that something is very out of kilter. A fundamental shift in what people think a fair society should look like, perhaps. Something is rotten in the state of Denmark. Or maybe Dalston.

We all have come to expect free education, free healthcare, and benefits that will preserve a minimum standard of decency for the unemployed. But what sort of system do we have to protect people when these things fail? I ask you to give a thought to the legal aid system.

I was having a fag outside the office and thinking about all the letters piling up on my desk. Marilyn came with a volunteer from one of the local charities to tell me that she owed £45k in rent and she was going to be evicted. She was a pensioner who had worked her life as a cleaner on minimum wage, then got thrown on the scrapheap when she retired.

Marylin said she had found the benefit forms a bit confusing and hadn't received Housing Benefit in 2 years. I can't fathom why the taxpayer should have to pay 45k for the run down homeless hostel where Marylin was living, but that's another story. The fact that she was in arrears however automatically froze the move on-process to a cheaper council flat, so the arrears sky rocketted.

We wrote to the Council suggesting that their information was wrong, the volunteer made sure that Marylin made it to the Benefit Office with all her papers, and the Council saw the light. Marylin is in a home, and the legal aid investment of £350 secured £45,500 in increased benefits and debt write-offs.

Charles grew old and the vessels in his brain grew crooked. When he saw an officer for the Council, he saw an enemy. His rent arrears rose to £12,000, he wouldn't answer the door to anybody, and when he was taken into hospital he was on the point of losing his home.

We pitched in, and his rent was paid off by Housing Benefit and family. Charles has taken the wonder pills, he's back with his family. For the £7k pay-back in additional rent payments, we spent £174 in legal aid.

For Marilyn and for Charles we provided a service that might not be around for very much longer.

In the Green Paper on legal aid, all benefits advice will be disallowed, all debt advice until your home is at risk- and by that time it is often too late. All employment advice for employees will go, but employers will use lawyers all the same. most of housing advice and most of immigration advice will go. Unless violence is involved in divorce cases, no help for separating families, and thus the paramount rights of children will go unexamined. Nothing will be fairer, and nothing will be safer for families, the unemployed and elderly people.

One third of civil advice will be cut. £1 in £3 will go, and 500,000 people will lose the benefit of free legal advice. 75% of legal aid for charities will go. I expect to hear about a lot more people losing their homes soon.

Cuts to the civil legal aid system mean that £1 in lost money advice will lose ordinary people £10 in cold hard cash- such as back paid benefits, managed debt, and rent that is repaid. The social costs of evicting families in some cases has been estimated at £34k- much of this taxpayer money, making the cuts appear not only vicious but ineffective.

The barbarity of the proposals can be viewed through the prism of the Human Rights Act. While the rights of assembly and free expression are something we have seen more discussion of following the student marches, the cuts directly engage with Article 8, which concerns the integrity of privacy, the family and the home.

Article 8 is a qualified right. This means that unlike certain absolute rights which can never be infringed, such as the right not to be tortured under Article 3. an infringement can be justified if it is proportionate. So failure to pay rent can usually be justified as reason for eviction in many circumstances.

By cutting money advice, Marylin and Charles would have had no help in obtaining the benefits they were entitled to, accrued rent arrears and would have lost their homes. Their article 8 rights would have been interfered with, for no very good reason. An ounce of prevention at the right moment would have stopped this at an early stage. Now this will no longer be possible.

Similarly, cutting immigration advice will mean that thousands of children in this country, some of them British, will continue to live in poverty because their mothers have the wrong immigration papers, and do not make the application for leave to remain on the basis of settled family life, under Article 8.

The consequence of this is that thousands of kids in the UK who have been living here for years, some of them British, are going to school without proper meals, don't have enough clothes to wear, live in overcrowded and insecure conditions, and will have poor later life outcomes. This is because by definition their mothers will not be entitled to work or claim benefits, and are often forced to work illegally at low wages, live on hand-outs from the churches and community, and in a case that I know of where the child was disabled,live in garages and give blow jobs to strangers to feed her family.

I'm putting my heart on my sleeve here. I have worked as a solicitor in a London Law Centre for over 16 years. As such, I am a poor man's lawyer. Cases like those of Marylin and Charles are by no means uncommon, and we have seen and heard stories that some people would not believe and many would weep over. But we keep on doing it, because overall we help make a big difference to people's lives, and thus make Hackney and the world that tiny bit better.

I love Hackney. I always have done, ever since I arrived for my first job as a pea green newly minted lawyer. In a seething melting pot in the East End where ageing cockney pensioners rub shoulders with people who are Jewish, Islamic, Schizophrenic, have dogs, have dogs on strings, are homeless, are failing at school, have gone to university, are HIV positive, drug dependant, nurses, Christian, affluent yuppies hoping that the Islington effect will improve the value of their homes, squatters, go to raves, Atheists, disabled people wheezing from the effort of the stairs when the lift breaks down again, fabulous graffiti artists, teenagers chucked out by their families and trying to make it in college when their EMA is going to be taken away, bewildered Eastern Europeans who came over in the boom then ended up living in underground car parks and catching TB, bewildered people certain that the last 27 cars whose numbers they have written down in green ink are following them and want to take away their kidneys, straights, gays, goths, punks, any sexuality or band, phlebotomists, mums with little kids, care assistants, teaching assistants, youth workers, GP's, performance artists, it's all endless. I can't help feeling dumb trying to help people who are all so different and feeling stupid because the job's limitless, all this job's limitless, you could say we don't make any difference sometimes but at least we're listening.

I've seen the best of people and I see the worst. I've spoken to women who have been tortured and gang raped, I've spoken to grannies worried about their electric fires. I know of several doctors who could not practice or teach because their papers were not in order, when the NHS was screaming for help. I know of countless students trying to better themselves and facing eviction because they have lost benefits by making a decision to acquire a university degree. I've seen startling acts of kindness by members of the public stepping aside and helping their fellow human being out of the gutter.

But I think Hackney, thus London, thus the world is about to get meaner and poorer. Housing Benefit cuts will see evictions rise (here's a thought- why not control rents if we want the Housing Benefits bill to be lower?). We're already a dumping ground for affluent west London; if Westminster refuses a homeless family help, all too often they are dumped on Hackney Social Services. If it accepts a duty, then they're housed here anyway, thus driving rents up. But incredibly, the Evening Standard and Shelter produce information suggesting tens of thousands of people will find Hackney too posh to live in. And my conclusion is that if we're too poor to pay the person who changes your bed-pan when you can't do it for yourself a wage she can survive on, then as a society we are making the wrong decisions between under-taxed bankers' bonuses and things that really matter.

I don't want to see this society that we are in danger of moving into. A society where inequality is entrenched; a society where the fighting mutt that is Hackney becomes an effete poodle is not where I want to live and work. So I ask you to check out and like Justice for all, the umbrella campaign group for Legal Aid, and trying to build a more civil society. See: http://www.facebook.com/#!/pages/Justice-for-All/109923889070414.

Ladies and gentlemen, brothers and sisters, I rest my case. For now.