What is happening with the Legal Services Commission?

Now it seems that Derek Hill is leaving the LSC. He was Director of Something Old, Something New which was the LSC’s Lets Make It Up As We Go Along policy department.

The qualifications for such a role involve being able to use a lot of bizspeak and to talk about legal aid (just as the same sort of people talk about health and education) in terms of consumers and delivery and quality and value for money and efficiency.

In this way Mr Hill earned a lit of money, helped draft lots of reports and policy documents, ignored the views of those who offer the services remunerated by legal aid and tried to create a system that fails to recognise that advice giving by experienced, professional people is what legal aid is actually all about as opposed to call centres, low level advice giving and a load of bureaucracy.

There are a few more at the LSC who could do with a redundancy notice. Hopefully any New Government will consider very carefully why there needs to be such layers upon layers of management and policy-makers etc etc and so few, proportionally, actually doing the job.