Access to justice for Disadvantaged Communities is a valuable and readable account of the complex issues facing Law Centres in a political climate that is increasingly hostile to the provision of good quality legal aid services to those most in need. It is particularly useful for the way in which it brings together in one place a number of different accounts of Law Centres and their role in providing access to justice, both historical and contemporary. The book charts the development of notions of access to justice, first put into practice through the establishment of legal aid as part of the post-war settlement, and subsequently upheld through the creation of Law Centres to meet the needs of disadvantaged communities in the 1970s. It then documents the erosion of those principles in subsequent waves of legal aid reform with an increasing focus on the marketisation of public services. As the book points out, by the early 1990s there were criticisms of the welfare state from both the right and the left regarding the accountability of public services to service users and communities. However, the only solution proposed to these problems by government was to transfer the principles of the market to the provision of public services; other alternatives for improving accountability were not considered.

The book grapples with the analysis of concepts like social justice and access to justice and offers a variety of interpretations from different perspectives. Rather than choosing any particular interpretation above another, it highlights the complexities and criticisms that attach to each and suggests how these concepts may inform the dilemmas and challenges that Law Centres currently face.

This work is particularly concerned with the situation in Law Centres following the implementation of the legal aid reforms introduced as a result of the Carter review. The Carter review led to the introduction of fixed fees for casework and competition for contracts. The main motivation behind this was to save costs on legal aid. The book considers how this change to the fee structure has limited the ability of Law Centres to carry out the policy work that made them stand apart from private practice and whether this has had a corrosive effect on the ethos and values that underpin Law Centres. The findings suggest that while less and less community and policy work is possible under the new contracting arrangements, particularly where Law Centres are dependent on legal aid income with no additional grant funding, Law Centres are still finding ways to take a broader approach to dealing with the problems faced by their clients and the communities they represent. Furthermore, while competitive tendering has in some instances increased local conflict, the research shows that collaboration between Law Centres and other local agencies still continues. However, this does seem to be largely where there is ongoing local authority commitment to the provision of advice. Moreover, while the message from the book is that law centre values and ethos remain largely intact, there is also a strong feeling that it is a constant struggle for Law Centres to survive while maintaining those core values. There are reports within the book of Law Centre workers who have left, unable to work in an environment which has moved so far from the ideal of community service that they originally joined the Law Centre to fulfil.

Law Centres are only a small proportion of the advice agencies in the country, but this research suggests that, where they remain, their policy-based motivations and independent political thinking mean they are often considered ‘the lynchpins’ of local voluntary sector advice provision by other agencies. The report makes a strong case for recognising the value of Law Centres and therefore how changes to or the loss of Law Centres may affect local advice provision in disadvantaged communities more profoundly than might be expected from their size.

The book's authors clearly recognise the importance of Law Centres and their unique approach in terms of providing access to justice. Yet, because much of their research is based on the accounts Law Centre workers give of themselves and their own contributions to access to justice, it would be possible for them to be criticised for adopting a romanticised version of Law Centres. It would, for example, have been interesting to have seen some attempt to quantify the reduction in community and policy work being conducted by Law Centres as a result of the changes to legal aid. Nevertheless, the authors recognise the importance of corroborating the claims of Law Centre workers and do so by seeking the views of external organisations, including other local advice agencies and local authority representatives. It is notable that, in the main, these organisations also value Law Centres and have great respect for them and the way they conduct their work.

It is unfortunate that the period covered by the research is prior to the introduction of the latest round of civil legal aid reforms, which came in in April 2013. The massive reduction in scope in social welfare law matters presents a huge financial challenge to Law Centres and would bring into sharp relief many of the complexities that this research identified. Several Law Centres have closed since the introduction of the cuts and many others are on the brink of closure (Legal Action Group, 12 February 2014 http://www.legalactiongroupnews.org.uk/law-centre-closures/). It would therefore have been very interesting to see how access to justice and many of the issues raised in the research, such as values and ethos, organisational structure and competition versus collaboration were faring in the new environment. Nonetheless, this work provides a very useful benchmark for comparison in the future, when the impact of these most recent legal aid changes on Law Centres comes to be researched.