In February the Legal Services Commission (LSC) announced that, as current civil legal aid contracts come to an end on 13 October 2010, any organisation who wishes to deliver legal aid work in Family (including Family Mediation) or Social Welfare Law from 14 October 2010 would need to apply for and be awarded a new contract. The tender process for this opened on 26 February 2010, and the deadline for submitting tenders was 21 April 2010.

In a press release last week, the LSC pronounced that the tenders were carried out openly and transparently, and focused on commissioning quality legal advice and representation where people most need these services, with the aim of improving current services wherever possible. The Commission claimed that the tenders were popular among both law firms and not-for-profit organisations.  All tenders were oversubscribed which meant that it was not possible to award all bidders contracts nor, in some cases, the level of work bid for. Sir Bill Callaghan, Chair of the LSC, said: “Ensuring quality advice provision, where it is needed, is at the heart of our civil contract tenders. We are confident that we now have quality-assured advice provision across England and Wales.”

This optimistic view was not shared by everyone. Indeed, the Law Society is urging the LSC to undertake an urgent public review after it emerged the number of firms providing family legal services has been halved. The fall-out from the tender process, which, it is claimed, leaves families, children and domestic violence victims without genuine access to legal services, has prompted the Society to call for its immediate suspension while a public review of the process, its outcome and the impact of access to justice is assessed. The LSC chief executive Carolyn Downs, in an interview with the Law Society Gazette, admitted that the dramatic cull in family law suppliers was not the intended outcome of the tendering round.

Clearly the law of unintended consequences was once again in operation. Law Society President Linda Lee said: “This is sadly the latest and perhaps most alarming of the LSC’s apparently haphazard attempts to reshape legal aid notwithstanding the clear intent of the previous and present Governments to return policy on legal aid to the Ministry of Justice. The LSC has, we fear, lost control of the processes.” She added: “When even the LSC itself is saying the outcome was not intended, and when clients are deprived of legal advice and services and firms are seeing important contracts vanish, the Government has to take a closer look at this and make a decision. If these systemic changes were being imposed on farmers or fishermen then compensation would be paid. All businesses, not just law firms, trading in Government controlled markets will be watching very closely how the Government handles this situation. In this era of the Big Society, the rule of law and genuine access to justice for all citizens must be an underpinning element of that concept.”