Second Year of Falmouth Dracaena Centre Webcam Advice Project

Grant: £24,230
September 5, 2018

The Falmouth Dracaena Centre Webcam Advice Project is a partnership between the Legal Advice Centre and the Dracaena Centre (Falmouth.

Engagement with the Dracaena Centre is key to the projects sustainability, and a great deal of time has been invested by the Legal Advice Centre in assisting the Dracaena Centre with fundraising, as the ambition is that the Dracaena Centre can take ownership of this project once it has secured funding in its own right.

Legal Expenses Insurance Project

Grant: £80,020
October 3, 2017

This Legal Expenses Insurance project is now entering its third year. In the previous two years work has been undertaken to scale up the sector's knowledge of how to engage with LEI and to undertake LEI casework. Engagement with key stakeholders was sought, to get them to understand the potential of LEI as a key part of the Access to Justice agenda.

This funding will allow this work to continue for two further years at a local and national level.

An LEI toolkit will be produced, for independent advice centres and other bodies to help them engage with LEI. Part of this work will include working with LexisNexis in order to develop an online LEI checker tool, which can also be used during advice triage. The ‘checker’ will be similar to the existing online Legal Aid eligibility tool, and will assist users and advisers to determine whether someone potentially has LEI.

Work will continue with key stakeholders to directly engage with the insurance and finance sectors. Both the coverage and scope of LEI will be developed, in order to provide a universal umbrella of LEI support.

Falmouth 'Skype' Specialist Legal Advice Project

Grant: £71,000
July 28, 2017

The Project is to establish a ‘Skype’ advice clinic at the Dracaena Centre, and also to provide remote support to Cornwall CAB also largely using Skype. Staff solicitors at the Legal Advice Centre will provide free legal advice remotely to persons in need in Falmouth using a bank of Skype enabled computers at the Dracaena Centre. The clinics will run weekly on Monday and Fridays. The advice provided will be on Welfare Benefits and debt. Follow-up work will be undertaken by LAC lawyers.

Legal Advice Centre will provide the following to Cornwall CAB:

• take all their disability benefit appeals to the First-tier tribunal;
• work with the CAB so that their efforts at Mandatory Reconsideration are more effective;
• provide the CAB and staff/volunteers from the Dracaena Centre with training on Universal Credit;
• provide the CAB with an employment consultancy service.

Falmouth & Plymouth Skype Advice Clinics

Grant: £3,900
June 27, 2017

Future Advice - Legal Expenses Insurance Project

Grant: £83,746
July 16, 2015

This project is to first scale up the sector’s knowledge of how to engage with LEI and then to develop public education around LEI. To make LEI work for communities it will first require the sector to have the skill set so that it can utilise the regulatory framework to use LEI. This First Stage is to develop the knowledge base of the sector by the provision of training/information, on-going support and in some cases supervision. This will be a national project, so by necessity will need to fully utilise new technology to provide the necessary capacity and reach.