Romain: Greater rigour from being a charity
A charity set up to help support litigants in person (LiPs) and improve legal education has been awarded a grant of £19,000 from the National Lottery Community Fund.
Edward Romain, founder and CEO of Blind Justice, said the charity, which supports 41 LiPs, would use the money to support a further 40-50.
Mr Romain said Blind Justice wanted to continue with its educational and research work, but its primary goal was to “equip people who are priced out of law” – ineligible for legal aid and unable to pay for their own lawyer.
He launched it last year [1] with research finding that complex court administrative processes “increasingly function as gatekeepers to justice” and shut out LiPs.
Blind Justice, previously a community interest company, successfully applied to the Charity Commission this year to be registered as a charity.
Mr Romain said this enabled Blind Justice to apply for grants and show that it could “stand up to scrutiny and inspection and the rigour of a charitable registration”.
He wanted to recruit people with legal expertise to the board of the charity and was talking to solicitors and barristers about becoming trustees.
Mr Romain said many of the LiPs currently helped by Blind Justice, which has a waiting list, had legal problems relating to housing, employment, family, regulatory and consumer issues.
Blind Justice could assess a LiP’s position, review their documents, identify the issues and produce a written case review setting out their options and practical next steps.
“We do not conduct litigation or exercise rights of audience. The service is deliberately built around non-reserved support and is not a substitute for a solicitor. Where someone needs regulated representation, we say so.”
The Lottery grant will fund a 12-month project beginning in September in Brighton. The funding will cover caseworker time, monthly drop-in sessions in community venues, local outreach, travel, printing for people without reliable internet access and the running costs of the service.
Mr Romain said the downside of the grant was that it came from the Community Fund and therefore could only help people from the area where Blind Justice was based, instead of nationally.
It was difficult for new charities to raise money as they lacked a track record and management accounts, and he had noticed that legal sector charity funding went “to the same people, all the time”.
Blind Justice “would love to be able” to apply for funding from the Access to Justice Foundation, but had not met the turnover threshold of at least £250,000 for the grants given out earlier this year.
“This was a bit of a disappointment for us. As a brand new charity, we’re in a chicken and egg situation, in that we don’t have the management accounts that many people require.”
He went on: “The part that troubles me most is the tendency to use size as a proxy for capability. Large organisations have reach and infrastructure that we do not, and I would not pretend otherwise.
“But small organisations can also have an advantage. We can take a case quickly, change what we do in response to what is actually coming through the door, and make decisions without several layers of process.
“That responsiveness matters at the early stage of a legal problem, before it becomes a crisis. Yet smaller organisations can be the least able to fund it.”
Mr Romain added that Blind Justice was launching a university panel series on access to justice at Mansfield College, Oxford, in November, supported by the Oxford law faculty, with Joshua Rozenberg moderating and Helen Mountfield KC on the panel.