CLACs - an update

CLACs - Community Legal Advice Centres - were dreamed up by the Legal Services Commission as a way of reducing the huge amounts spent on legal aid.

Local authorities which used to fund advice charities like CAB now had to put this service out to tender, seeking bids from partnerships between solicitors and advice organisations. When the second and third of these contracts, in Leicester and Hull, were won by A4e in partnership with Howells solicitors, it looked like the LSC was thinking that perhaps it wasn't such a good idea after all. A group called the Legal Action Group said that plans for more were to be delayed or abandoned. But the LSC was adamant that this was not the case. In a docment published last November it insisted that "although the LSC believes that joint commissioning with other funders is the best model for achieving truly integrated services, the LSC is only likely to commission further Community Legal Advice services, such as centres or networks, in a limited number of new areas between 2010 and 2013. That assumes the LSC is satisfied with the outcome of the 2010 tender."

There are now five CLACs (Derby and Portsmouth have been added, but A4e is not involved in either) as well as similar arrangements in the East Riding of Yorkshire and in West Sussex, where no information is available about which organisations are involved. Five more CLACs are planned, in Barking & Dagenham, Gloucestershire, Manchester, Sunderland and Wakefield,and the Gateshead CLAC is coming up for re-tendering. It will be interesting to see whether A4e, or any other private company, wants to get involved. Meanwhile, the A4e-run Hull CLAC reports advising more than 15,000 people in its 18 months of operation, and achieving positive outcomes for 75% of those people.

Damning verdict on Train to Gain

"A £1.5bn government initiative to improve the skill levels of employees has been heavily criticised by MPs", reports the BBC. "Train to Gain" was launched in 2006, through contracts with private sector companies. It was intended to encourage employers to put their workers through qualifications at NVQ level 2, by paying their wages for the time they spent in training. A4e won the contracts in many areas, and it was clear from the outset that there was a tortuous administration system and unrealistic targets. The Public Accounts Committee blames the Learning and Skills Council, which was responsible for organising the scheme, and says that "Success rates for too many providers had been lower than expected .......... It also said £112m spent on skills advisers was not good value for money." An Ofsted report in 2008 was largely positive but criticised the "brokerage" layer of the contracts. The Chair of the PAC said: "Despite providing work-based training for around 5% of the workforce, the Train to Gain programme has been mismanaged from the outset. In the face of evidence of what was achievable, targets for the first two years were unrealistically ambitious. The number of learners, the level of demand from employers and the capacity of training providers were at first all overestimated. By the third year, demand for training, fuelled by substantially widened eligibility for the programme and by the recession, had increased to the point where the programme could no longer be afforded."

A4e is the "National Lead Provider for Train to Gain" through the A4e Consortium. But the responsibility lies with the LSC and, ultimately, with the government.