“YOUNG PEOPLE need to talk to someone they can trust. There’s often no one there to pay attention,” says 18-year-old Jo, who is clearly indebted to Canvey Island Youth Project. She used to be at the community centre “every day, all the time” and, even though she is back at work, she still goes every week.

Jo’s life went into freefall after she lost her job as a care worker. The teenager fell into debt after failing to pay tax and national insurance and ended up homeless. “The project helped me find a room,” she says. “Up until then, I was sleeping on the floors of family friends. I felt like I’d never get my life together, that I’d be poor for the rest of my life and never do things like go on holidays like normal kids.”

The project offered Jo more than a shoulder to cry on: staff there put the teenager in touch with a lawyer. On the lawyer’s advice, Jo is now pursuing a legal action claiming harassment against her old employer and that negative work references have unfairly hindered her subsequent career.

Couldn’t her parents have helped her out? “I never really got on with my parents, so that wasn’t an option. I was by myself,” she replies.

Jo was lucky. She was the beneficiary of a pilot service funded by the Legal Services Commission (LSC) called Lawyers for Young People and run by Colchester law firm Fisher Jones Greenwood LLP. The scheme was launched in July to provide legal services for young people in Essex and is the first LSC not-for-profit contract awarded to a commercial law firm. “We’re trying to create venues which are easy for young people to come to,” explains Simone Surgenor, a solicitor. “Young people won’t walk through the doors of a law firm.”

The desperate need for legal help to be targeted at such a vulnerable client group has been well-documented, as has the failure to meet that need (see below).

James Kenrick, the advice services development manager at Youth Access, the membership organisation for young people’s information services, notes that, among people reporting homelessness problems, people between 18 and 24 are: “Seven times more likely to have reported a problem but 11 times less likely to have obtained advice than people aged 25 and over.”

For those lawyers working at the small number of youth groups and charities that target young people who fall through the gaps in the legal aid system, these are worrying times. According to a new report from Youth Access, the average amount of time spent by an adviser in the not-for-profit sector on a housing problem for someone aged 17 to 24 is only 197 minutes — compared with an average of 232 minutes.

This finding angers those who deal with young people. They draw attention to the unsurprising fact that their clients are more demanding than the average cases: less articulate, more disorganised and often vulnerable.

In fact, specialist children’s services do take longer over their clients. According to Youth Access, one legal service that deals only with young people spends 511 minutes. But Youth Access is anxious about what will happen to such dedicated services when the Government overhauls legal aid following the review by Lord Carter of Coles and the implementation of his recommended shift from hourly rates to fixed fees.

Streetwise Community Law Centre, in Bromley, South London, is the only law centre in England dedicated to giving free advice to those aged from 13 to 25. It has seven case workers. “I don't like to call the young people ‘difficult’,” says solicitor Roselle Potts. “It’s not their fault that they’re harder to work with and harder to engage with than your average client. But we’ve had to adopt different ways of working with them.”

For Streetwise, this means encouraging an informal atmosphere where people can drop in rather than operating a system of rigid appointments; it also offers outreach sessions in places such as Connexions’ offices.

“If you give a young person advice accompanied by a letter, that doesn’t mean that they’re going to get what they’re entitled to,” Potts says. “Sometimes they get a poor service. They’re easy to fob off, or wind up to the point where they shout and scream and can legitimately be thrown out.”

Potts would like to know where a centre such as Streetwise fits into Lord Carter’s vision of economies of scale delivered through contracts with larger providers doing volume casework. “We're worried that they’re going to turn round to organisations like ours and say that we’re too small,” she says. “Who’s going to do this if we don’t? There was no one doing this work before we were.”

It is a view shared by the national children’s charity the Children’s Legal Centre. “The problem is that it often takes much longer with a child than with an adult,” agrees director Carolyn Hamilton. “They can be very vulnerable and it’s difficult for them to come to us, we have to go to them.”

This is not an approach that fits happily with the Carter revolution. As Hamilton puts it: “It sometimes creates a difficulty for the LSC, they’d turn around and say: ‘Why do your cases take longer than the average case?’ We would say. that’s probably right, but they are much more difficult.”

But does a project such as Lawyers for Young People make a difference?

Corinne Wheeler, co-ordinator at the Canvey Island Youth Project, has no doubts. “It's wonderful to have this kind of support for us, let alone the young people,” she says. What did they do before July? “Ring round local solicitors trying to find someone,” replies Wheeler. “That could be horrendous. Recently, all the solicitors in Basildon had run out of legal aid funding and couldn’t see anybody.”

SHUT OUT: YOUNG PEOPLE AND ACCESS TO JUSTICE

Prepared by James Kenrick, advice services development manager at Youth Access

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