West Sussex is having a bit of trouble with its CLAN. The draft spec was out in December 2008 with a few to having the final spec out in April and then have the CLAN up and running sometime around Sep / Oct 2009.
It is rumoured that the LA’s involved, of which there are many, aren’t to happy with the LSC and that this has meant that the final spec still isn’t out. A final make or break meeting is expected this Monday, 8th June, but even then the start date for the CLAN isn’t expected till as late as April 2010.
House will attempt to do some digging as to what exactly the LSC and LA’s are fighting over!
It is expected that there will be one bidder for the CLAN.
House wonders if the LSC should rearrange the words ‘Dead flogging a horse’.
Thank you for this interesting and useful information House. I would be interested to hear of further developments and more detail on why the LA was not too happy with the LSC.
Is it just me or is the whole CLAN/CLAC an enormous waste of time and money dreamt up by people at the LSC who do not really understand legal services? It occurred to me the other day that there is already a network of community legal advice centres called the Citizens Advice Bureau and that rather than create a new network the LSC could work with them to provde improved initial advice and signposting. The LSC could then have got round the perceived issue of people with “clusters of legal problems” not being able to get help with all of them by encouraging and funding the development of the CABX and other local suppliers to provide a wider range of services and to improve referral procedures. The provision of improved referrals procedures could have been made an LSC contracts. Grants could be given for firms and Law Centres who wanted to move into new areas of law.
The people at the LSC who think that local authoities were part of the solution to people’s legal problems clearly have limited awareness of the limits of what local authorities can do for the public and that they are frequently the cause of people’s legal problems. More than three quartres of my work as a housing lawyer is against local authorities. If suppliers of legal services are expected to be part funded by local authorities then it is inevitable that suppliers are going to face a conflict of interest between serving the interests of their clients or their local authority funders. Why not get the Police to become partners in the provision of funding for criminal defence work too?
Hopefully the more CLACs or CLANs that fail the more likely the LSC will be to get rid of the “sorcerer’s apprentice” elements amongst is policy makers responsible for these daft ideas and start to have a proper dialogue with the organisations already trying to supply legal services.
Cheers William,
I agree, from what I have heard in many of the areas where CLANs are proposed there is only 1 expected bidder and that’s the CAB.
I can’t see a County Council wanting to be responsible for the loss of multiple bureau, 9 in West Sussex for instance, if the CAB were to lose any CLAN bid.
One rather thinks that having one organisation bid on something rather defeats the very point of putting it to tender in the first place.