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Community legal advice

Community Legal Service

The Citizens Advice service is part of the Community Legal Service (CLS) which was introduced by the Government as part of its reform of legal services. CLS aims to ensure that people can get information and advice about their legal rights and responsibilities and helps to enforce them.

The CLS is intended to make the supply of advice:

• more effective
• more consistent
• better quality
• available to more people who need it.

The CLS covers civil law, not criminal law, with a particular interest in improving access to social welfare law (for example, employment, debt, housing, immigration, welfare benefits).

It moves away from the idea of legal services being solely the province of courts and lawyers and encourages advice agency provision, new ways of providing services, and alternative methods of resolving disputes.

The main elements are:

• Civil legal aid contracting, funded from the CLS Fund, which replaces the legal aid budget
• the Quality Mark which is intended to ensure that the agencies within the CLS provide a high quality service
• increased use of IT.

The CLS was formally launched in April 2000.

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