Page 112 - Solving Housing Disputes

which might require resourcing, hardware and training for “trusted faces”
in “trusted places”, such as Citizens Advice or AdviceUK;

• The primacy of quality advice provision: while nothing should
derogate from the primacy of quality, face-to-face advice provision by a
specialist in a particular area of the law, where that quality advice is not
available on a face-to-face basis, advice through a platform ought to
feature practitioners with expertise in the relevant area of the law, whether
proximate or remote to users of online justice services and whether legal
aid funded or on an unbundled basis. Where a person does not have a
housing law specialist in their area, they should be able to access legal
advice over the phone or through video chat; and

• Facilitated legal advice: Advice provision must be easy for users to find,
which requires prominent signposting to advice within any landing page.

4.29 The key for incorporating advice provision into a platform or portal, is to
signpost a person to the best form of specialist advice and representation
available to them. In England and Wales, there have been efforts to categorise
and geographically locate legal resources and advice. For example, Lasa’s
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service “advicelocal” provides links to legal resources and postcode-filtered
information about local advice services for issues including benefits,
employment issues, financial and housing problems. One option for the HCRS
might be for structured questioning or a decision tree to include pathways to
advice. Users could input their postcode to local nearby services (either in-person
or remotely delivered) and answer a questionnaire to assess eligibility for legal
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aid. They might then be signposted to a discrete part of the HCRS portal with
a list of available providers for their area, including various methods available
for advice provision (face-to-face, telephone, digital). Whatever form it takes,
the key is to establish a “one-stop shop”: a portal where ADR, formal
adjudication, advice, procedural assistance and quality legal advice,
representation and information is all available.

321 https://advicelocal.uk/ JustBeagle provides a search engine, through which users can find lawyers in
their area, specific to their legal problem: https://justbeagle.com/ Etic Lab is also seeking to map out the
provision of services on a national level as part of the Feasibility Study for its project Routes to Affordable
Justice: https://routestojustice.co.uk/

322 This could be embedded from https://www.gov.uk/check-legal-aid

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