Bexley Community Legal Service Partnership
The Community Legal Service aims to assist people to get help and information about their legal rights and to ensure that they understand how to enforce them in the right place and at the right time.
To make it easier for the public to get advice and legal help, the CLS brings together organisations offering advice and legal services into local networks. These networks include solicitors, Citizens' Advice Bureaux, Law Centres, local authority services (including libraries), community centres, and a host of other organisations. The networks are organised and supported by Community Legal Service Partnerships, which are made up of representatives of the Legal Services Commission, local authorities, funders and providers of advice.
The job of Partnerships is to assess the need for legal and advice services in their area. They must also work together to ensure that the right kinds of services are available to meet priority needs.
Details of the CLS Partnerships are available on the Legal Services Commission Website.
Community Legal Service Direct is a new easy-to-use service that can help you deal with your legal problems. It provides free information, help and advice direct to the public on a range of common issues.
Bexley's Community Legal Service Partnership was launched in 2001 and is
managed by a Steering Group comprised of representatives from the Council, voluntary
organisations and legal practices. The current chair of the Steering Group is
David Bryce-Smith of Bexley Council's Development and Public Protection department.
Bexley Council has its own Legal Services Department. This is made up of Solicitors, Barristers and Legal Executives and others who give legal advice only to the council itself, e.g. in-house advice providers, including housing and consumer advice, and some outside bodies. The Council's legal advisors, therefore, cannot advise members of the public and members of the public should seek their own legal advice via the connections within this web page or otherwise.
As set out in the Action Plan, the Bexley Community Legal Services Partnership has been working to produce a number of advice leaflets. Leaflets relating to Welfare Rights Benefits, Employment Law, Housing Law and Family Law, are being launched and copies of the leaflets, together with a general poster showing the location of a large number of advice providers in Bexley, will be made available here.
Consumer Direct
Consumer advice agencies are working together as a group to develop a network
plan to ensure that good quality consumer advice is accessible by the whole community.
The Consumer Direct initiative, encourages consumer advice providers
to join-up their services and provide consumers, wherever they live, with reliable,
timely and quality assured advice.
Consumer advice needs to reflect today's complex and fast-changing marketplace. It must take account of developments such as the growth of internet shopping and the often complicated ways that goods and services are sold. We would expect advice available to cover:
- what to look out for when buying goods and services
- consumers' rights and obligations when buying goods and services
- how to obtain redress when things go wrong
Consumer Support Networks and the Community Legal Service are complementary initiatives. In Bexley we have found that Bexley's Consumer Support Network has found a natural home within CLSP structure and it now operates as a subgroup of BCLSP.
For more general information see the Consumer
Direct website.
Community Legal Service Quality Mark
An important principle of the Community Legal Service is that of simple referral to the right part of the network. If the first organisation you contact cannot help, they should be able to refer to another organisation that can. Community Legal Service Partnerships will ensure that advice providers in their area take part in a referral network and strongly encourage providers to apply for the Quality Mark.
One of the ways to improve access to, and delivery of legal and advice services in the community is by setting up and running referral networks. Effective referral is also one of the requirements of the CLS Quality Mark. We want people to recognise a certain standard of legal information and help.
When you see an organisation that displays the CLS logo, you know that organisation meets certain quality standards. If a Community Legal Service provider is unable to deal with all aspects of your problem, it can refer clients to another Quality Marked organisation.
For more information on the Community Legal Service Quality Mark see the Legal Services Commission website.
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