When roadworks began close to his pub, landlord John Green was one of several businessmen who found himself effectively marooned by fencing and closed roads. A development in Hull city centre prevented customers from getting there. “We thought we were going to lose our house and everything we’d worked for,” Green, 49, says. “I’d be waking up in a cold sweat at 3am or 4am not knowing what was going to happen. I was really frightened about how this was affecting my wife.”

He went to Hull Citizens Advice Bureau — one of 13,500 people in the past year to benefit from its legal advice. “Without them we wouldn’t have known where to turn,” says the former landlord of the Yorkshireman public house.

He and his wife, Susan, had amassed £75,000 of debt. The CAB put together a repayment scheme that satisfied creditors and saved their home. He was also advised to seek legal advice to pursue a legal claim. “No one would touch the case. I rang every single solicitor in the Yellow Pages and everyone turned it down,” Green says. “Hull CAB has been a lifeline.”

How long the bureau will remain a lifeline is not known. Established in 1939 and one of the biggest in the CAB network, Hull CAB failed to make preferred bidder stage for a new community legal advice centre (CLAC) being set up by the Legal Services Commission (LSC). Instead, an out-of-town tender headed by a private company, A4E, and supported by solicitors Howells, both in Sheffield, was the favoured choice.

The LSC and Hull City Council promise jointly to provide £3.5 million for advice services in the city. The Hull CAB, which has 55 staff and 64 volunteers, receives £649,000 from the local authority and £47,000 from the LSC. If the bureau does not make the CLAC, it will lose both sources of funding and probably be forced to close.

The LSC describes the purpose of its vision thus: “To deliver legal advice services to local communities according to local needs and priorities.” Should local communities have a say in the kind of legal services they receive?

There is considerable anger from the Hull CAB supporters — and it is popular — that change is being pushed through without proper community involvement. According to a briefing prepared by bureau workers Ray Davies and Rosemary Pantelakis for the trade union Unite, a report was drawn up by the council in September stating there would be a public meeting over the introduction of a CLAC. Davies and Pantelakis say no meeting took place. “The importance cannot be understated,” they argue. “The feedback from any public meeting would have shaped the specification.”

The LSC wants up to 20 community legal advice centres in place throughout England and Wales by 2010. “The unintended consequence could be that [the new CLAC] could lead to long-term damage to the community infrastructure,” David Harker, chief executive of Citizens Advice, says. “People will realise what’s gone only when they look back and think that there was a 70-year-old CAB, actively supported by the local community with a large volunteer workforce able to take on new initiatives,” Harker says.

Elsewhere in the not-for-profit sector, the Carter reforms and the fixed fees that came in last October are having a devastating effect. John Fitzpatrick, senior lecturer at Kent University and chairman of the Law Centres Federation, believes that as many as 20 law centres (of 58) are “struggling”.

The Legal Action Group has spoken to eight London law centres that describe themselves as on “the brink of closure”. “These things taken as a whole stand to deliver a body blow to law centres.”

Law centres have always had a threadbare financial existence but, this time, it looks as if the network of 58 centres is unravelling. There are fears that the Southwest London Law Centres, which receive 68 per cent of their funding from the LSC and helped more than 26,000 people last year, could be the first London law centre to collapse.

The LSC acknowledges that law centres have been hard hit. Until a few years ago legal aid contributed to about 20 per cent of their funding. But a slow erosion of local authority support means that the LSC provides about half the money now.

Fitzpatrick argues that the imposition of fixed fees undermines the unique ethos of law centres of taking solicitor-quality legal advice to vulnerable communities. “We did not sign up for this. It has never been the ambition of law centre workers to operate in the same way as private practice solicitors or other not-for-profit agencies,” he says. “Where is the respect for diversity of provision?”

In short, there isn’t any; nor is the LSC pretending that there is. Crispin Passmore, director of the Community Legal Service who used to manage the Coventry Law Centre, says its parent body, the LSC, has “no desire for good organisations delivering a good service with good-quality access and value for money to be struggling”. Nor is he offering the sector any succour. “The test for me is not whether agencies pull out but can we get other people to come in and do the work at the fixed fees. Because if they can, on a sustainable basis, that’s a successful transition,” he says.

In Hull, there are also concerns about the new community advice centres’ criteria: in particular, that required services be provided from the council’s customer service centres. “There are people in Hull who won’t go near a council building because it represents authority,” Pantelakis says. She advised Green, who is appalled at the notion. “Plain daft. It was the council that caused my demise,” he says. If Hull CAB closes, it isn’t just legally aided services that are at risk but all the other work it does. It could lose £443,702 which comes from the Treasury’s financial inclusion fund. More than four of ten people who walk into the CAB want advice on debt problems. In 2006-07 advisers renegotiated £3.3 million of debt and last year £4.4 million.

So what responsibility do the architects of CLACs have for the wider services offered to those people of Hull? Apparently, none; a spokeswoman says that the LSC “exists to fund legal aid — rather than other services”. “For too long publicly funded legal advice has been governed by the structure of the provider base and not by the problems people face. We have taken the decision to design CLACs to meet the needs of clients.” Apparently, whether those clients want them or not.

The author is director of communications and campaigns at the Legal Action Group

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