Legal advice
Sir, The Voluntary Advice Scheme is being withdrawn on the implementation of the Legal Advice and Assistance Scheme not only because it would have lost its purpose, which was to give charitable help to people outside the very restricted limit of the present statutory advice scheme, but because it would have had adverse consequences upon the public and would have borne particularly hardly on the poorest. It would also have put the Citizens Advice Bureaux workers in a false position.
This has now been appreciated by Mr Leighton and his colleagues who no longer desire its retention.
The main mischief would have arisen in the following way. If, to save disclosure of means, a poor applicant was offered a choice between the voluntary scheme and the new one, the choice of the voluntary scheme would have resulted in an obligation to pay £2 when he might very well not have nad any contribution to pay at all under the new scheme. The betteroff applicant, well able to pay more than the voluntary fee, would have been equally disadvantaged if it turned out that a half-hour advice session was not enough and it was necessary to invoke the new Scheme for further help. In both cases the solicitor would be put to an unnecessary loss. This might not have mattered if the requests for advice were not too frequent, but, in an area of high need, the result could have been disastrous because a solicitor so placed would in self-protection withdraw from the voluntary panel. All that a solicitor has to sell is his time and that is a very limited commodity. To perform his function he has to maintain facilities which are extremely costly and, according to the district in which he practices, he has somehow or other to ensure earning between £8 and £15 per hour to keep going. This is something that the public has never understood. The questionnaires which the CAB workers completed revealed clearly by the comments they contained that they
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