While lawyers are fighting their corner on legal aid, the squeeze on public funds is hitting frontline legal services such as law centres who have much less muscle to resist. Mostly known and appreciated only by their local communities, they struggle to muster a campaign when the chips are down.

The Mary Ward Legal Centre in Holborn, Central London, is typical of how the legal aid shake-up is unwittingly hitting some of those most deserving of legal help. The centre provides pro bono legal services to more than 1,000 of London’s needy a year, including debt counselling. Its pro bono unit is faced with imminent closure, with a six-month respite until October to give it one last chance to raise the funds it needs to keep going.

The centre helps hundreds of people a year who cannot afford legal advice but have ended up needing it. They are cases, according to Lee Callaghan, a City lawyer who is one of the volunteer legal advisers, that Citizens Advice Bureaux would struggle to pursue, but are not high-profile enough to get any attention normally. “Yet,” he says, “they are everyday tales of anguish and torment on a human scale that affects people we all know.”

Take the case of the person landed with an electricity bill for £2,500 that arrived out of the blue — an incorrect assessment — that carries the threat of being cut off if not paid. The bill results from the fraud of one of the thousands of “energy switch” agents who operate by banging on a door and persuading the person to switch suppliers or forges his or her signature.

Or the case of a water bill that arrived from Thames Water for £2,000 even though the tenant had rented the same flat for nearly 50 years and had never before been presented with a bill. The landlord was refusing to pay it as required under the terms of the tenant’s protected tenancy. Or the case of the elderly lady talked into installing a loft which, when fitted, was so small and badly constructed that it was a death trap to get into and then persuaded to take out a loan to pay for it at an annual interest rate of 28 per cent.

Now, the free help for these cases and up to 1,000 similar ones a year that are handled by the centre is at risk.

The centre was established more than 100 years ago as the Poor Man’s Lawyer Service, a precursor to the postwar legal aid scheme. Mary Ward was a Victorian novelist (pen name Mrs Humphry Ward) who founded the Mary Ward Settlement to provide cultural and educational opportunities for the poor. She was instrumental in setting up Somerville College, the first women’s college at Oxford, and also introduced the first school for physically handicapped children and the play centre movement to England.

The centre is still a leading adult education institution, while its legal counterpart helps 5,000 people a year (more than half are ineligible for legal aid) including the 1,000 handled by the pro bono unit.

Changes to legal aid mean that new funding contracts for law centres such as Mary Ward are putting budgets under pressure: many more clients are being helped on more limited funds and so there is no spare cash for the pro bono unit.

Last week Pip Salvador-Jones, the director, wrote to all 60 volunteer pro-bono lawyers — from law firms of all sizes including many of the big City firms, as well as chambers and companies — notifying them of the closure.

The letter, says Callaghan, whose day job is as a senior corporate lawyer with Aviva plc, came as a shock. “The people I’ve seen over the past 18 years are often at their most vulnerable and desperate, be it from vengeful wives or husbands, service providers such as utility companies acting unreasonably or employers or contractors acting unfairly. They are people with no funds to pay for lawyers, might be facing unemployment or a claim from a company they have no idea how to defend or have entered a contract and things have gone badly and seriously wrong. The closure is an unintended consequence of the legal aid change — but a serious and deep-seated one nonetheless.”

The director told volunteers that because the legal aid caseworkers are working with reduced funds, the centre is having to prioritise simple, short matters and turn away people with complex legal problems. Meanwhile, office staff “are struggling to cope with increased Legal Services Commission bureaucracy and increased administrative duties associated with higher volumes of casework and clients”.

The centre uses £80,000 of its own income a year including its legal aid income to run its pro bono service and provide the high-quality services the public deserve and need. But now, he added, “we just cannot afford to subsidise it”.

The centre faces a tall order: raise £100,000 to allow the pro bono unit to re-open in October and £500,000 to secure its future. Callaghan says: “If a society is really to be judged on how it treats its most vulnerable, then everyone should take notice about what’s happening — and try to help.”

More details: Mary Ward Legal Centre 0207-831 7079

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