<aside> 📖 The core basis of the project was to:

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• Review the overall financial health of the free legal advice sector
• Survey 30 randomly selected Community Justice Fund grantees from across the UK for candid data on their financial situation.
• Demonstrate how years of inadequate, unstable, and short-term funding means that salaries and working conditions right across the charity sector have fallen well behind both the public and private sectors.
• Highlight how with the current cost of living crisis, every charity reported significant problems in recruiting and retaining staff.

<aside> 💡 This might be useful for:

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• [ ] Understanding the issues faced by advice services on the frontline
• [ ] Understanding how services navigate increased demand with lack of resources
• [ ] Understanding the impact of the cuts to legal aid

<aside> ✅ The key findings were:

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1. Grantee charities face greater financial challenges this year than at the outbreak of Covid in March 2020.
2. The data provided to us by charity leaders suggests that nearly 43,000 people will be unable to get specialist and legal advice in the next year.
3. The sector is heading into the 2023-24 financial year with an 18% hole in their finances, which will amount to a deficit of over £32 million, which has doubled in the last year from £15 million.
4. Organisations are seeing an increase in demand by as much as 48% and in some cases much more.
5. The lack of long-term core and inflation-linked funding means that it is harder and harder to recruit and retain not just casework and advice staff, but the management and other core staff needed to run effective services.
6. Most agencies when asked what additional funding they’d need to deliver against all current plans, especially anticipating the increased cost of meeting demand, said that they’d need an average of 15% extra funding on top of that needed to plug the deficit. Across the entire sector this extra £15% would amount to £26.25 million.

<aside> ➡️ The project made the following recommendations:

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• Ultimately, the sector desperately needs increased funding to deal with increased demand and lack of resourcing. To meet immediate new demand the sector needs at least an additional £15-£20 million.
• The most effective way to address these issues would be longer-term investment in the core costs of running advice organisations.
• Develop multi-year grants for frontline advice agencies to enable them to continue to run effective services, as promoted by the Access to Justice Foundation.