8 LEGAL WORLD SPEAKERS’ CORNER 28 July 2017 | www.newlawjournal.co.uk

suffice to deal adequately with the problem of Too little, too late? providing proper legal services to a section of the public who went short of them.’ The profession’s spontaneous response to Grenfell A 1974 World in Action documentary should be applauded, but demonstrates the dire state followed the pioneering for a week. The programme was called ‘The Law Shop’ of the Law Centres Network, says Jon Robins because the law centre occupied a rundown former butcher’s on a busy high street. The idea was to take the law to ordinary people who would otherwise be excluded from justice. ‘We are trying to lose the aura of respectability,’ one of the lawyers, a youthful looking James Saunders, says. Apart from the law centre’s founding solicitor Peter Kandler who wears a suit and tie, the other staff would have looked more at home at the Festival than Chancery Lane. Post-Grenfell, Law Shop is a shocking reminder of how inadequate housing has blighted that part of our capital. The voiceover calls it a slum where ‘68,000 people, many of them immigrants, are compressed into probably the worst housing conditions in Ray Tang/REX/Shutterstock Ray

© Britain’. The ghost of Rachman is in evidence as the film pans over terraces of semi- hree years ago North Kensington beleaguered not-for-profit sector and the pro derelict houses with smashed windows, bare Law Centre moved from its original bono community in general and the City firms plasterboard and leaking roofs in the shadow home at the top end of fashionable in particular. Since the fire, more than 650 of the newly-built A40 West Way. TPortobello Road to the Baseline people, mainly lawyers, have volunteered It is not just the state of the housing that has Business Centre, formerly the car park their help. Specialist advisers from other an uncomfortable echo four decades on. The underneath the and just law centres, the homeless charity Shelter, documentary captures the poor queuing up a few feet from Grenfell Tower. as well as members of the Housing Law for legal advice at Toynbee Hall. A ‘legacy of In the last few weeks, its small team of Practitioners Association have been providing Victorian charity’, as the programme puts it, lawyers, comprising the equivalent of seven the equivalent of one to two full-time housing which is no ‘match for the needs of the people full-time posts, plus a small army of volunteers advisers every day and experts in immigration, of North Kensington’. has advised 150 families affected by the fire, a employment and welfare benefits have also How did the legal profession react to this third of that number were formerly residents been on hand. The City has contributed new service? They regarded it as a threat to of the 24-storey tower block. infrastructure support. About 25 firms have private practice. The Law Society, which ran Much has been said about how the tragedy ensured a constant flow of up to six volunteer the scheme until the late 1980s, had has revealed the shocking inequality of lawyers a day. only just secured its own advice and assistance living conditions of residents in one of the scheme known as the green form scheme. most affluent parts of our capital. It also Minor miracle In its 1973 annual report the solicitors’ body has much to say about our failing system of The fact that North Kensington Law Centre decried the movement as a subversive means publicly funded legal advice. As I pointed is still open, albeit in reduced circumstances, of stirring up ‘political and quasi-political out in NLJ earlier this month the experience is a minor miracle. Since 2010 its income confrontation’. The issue came to a head in of the Grenfell tenants has prompted debate has collapsed from £900,000 in 2010 to just 1975 over the establishment of about the limits of legal aid (see ‘Lessons from £359,000. The 2013 legal aid cuts have pulled Law Centre where the young upstarts had to Hillsborough’, NLJ, 7 July 2017, p 6). the funding rug from under its feet. It can no promise to keep off private practice’s patch. The housing rights activist Pilgrim Tucker, longer afford the rent to co-exist alongside The profession might have somewhat who has been acting for the Grenfell Action the art galleries and fashionable eateries of begrudgingly come behind law centres but the Group, claimed on the BBC’s Newsnight that Portobello and so it relocated to a basement government has not. There are now just 45 law the residents ‘tried to get lawyers but because next to Grenfell. centres, 11 have closed in the last four years. of the legal aid cuts they couldn’t’. The Lord When North Kensington Law Centre first The Law Centres Network estimates that over Chancellor, David Lidington, blithely assured opened, the attorney general and the president the last four years their members have lost the public that their safety concerns would of the Law Society presided over the ceremony over 60% of legal aid income and over 40% of have been covered under the legal aid scheme and the lord chancellor sent his support. It has total income. irrespective of the 2013 legal aid cuts under a significant place in legal history: the first The profession’s spontaneous response to the Legal Aid Sentencing and Punishment of law centre in a network that was to grow to 60 Grenfell has allowed the law centre to give its Offenders Act 2012 (LASPO). Housing lawyers members at its height. clients the kind of advice they need—and that have since pointed out that tenants would not Michael Zander, now emeritus professor of the law centres were set up to provide. NLJ have been able to find legal aid for pre-emptive law at the LSE, explained the idealistic mission action irrespective of the dreaded LASPO. in 1978: ‘Nothing less than the introduction Jon Robins is an NLJ columnist, editor of The legal response to Grenfell represents of a new public service to operate alongside, The Justice Gap & a senior fellow in access to an unprecedented collaboration between a and supplement, the private profession would justice at Lincoln University.