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VI. ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I would like to thank the members of the Working Party itself for all their hard work
and invaluable assistance over the course of this project.
The Working Party is very grateful to volunteers at BlackRock in London who
provided pro bono legal research assistance in aid of the report and to Weil, Gotshal
& Manges (London) LLP for also providing pro bono legal research assistance.
We would also like to thank the Standard Life Foundation for generously funding
and supporting this project. We are also grateful to individuals from the DWP, who
provided us with detailed information on DWP policies and practices.
Our thanks are also due to Alex Walters, the original Working Party Rapporteur who
sadly left JUSTICE in August 2020, and Stephanie Needleman, who took over in
that role. We are also grateful to Sir Henry Brooke Fellow, Florence Powell and
interns Abby Buttle, Rossen Roussanov, and Erica San, and externs Alice Crawford
and Sebastian Van Dack-Owens, who assisted with researching for, and preparing,
the report. We are grateful to Administrative Justice Council members Professor
Naomi Creutzfeldt, Westminster University and Diane Sechi, Simmons & Simmons
LLP, for the production of a survey and report on the provision of social welfare
advice during the pandemic, which fed into this report.
We are particularly grateful to the following people for sharing their time and
expertise with us:
Les Allamby, Chief Commissioner, Northern Ireland Human Rights Commission
Dr Ben Baumberg Geiger, Senior Lecturer in Sociology and Social Policy,
University of Kent
Phil Booth, Coordinator, medConfidential
Molly Blackburn - Accessibility and Inclusion Lead: User Inclusion and
Engagement Team, HMCTS
Michael Brazier, Head of Digital Inclusion at HM Courts & Tribunals Service
Regional Tribunal Judge Mary Clarke, Social Entitlement Chamber
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