I have heard news of two interesting pilot projects this month. One project around asylum looked at the benefits of frontloading advice and ensuring good decisions at an early stage in asylum cases. The second looked at going one step further, by eliminating the need for advice in the first place.
The report of the Radical Advice Project undertaken by AdviceUK makes interesting reading and draws some very useful conclusions, the main one being that much of the demand for advice is ‘failure demand’, caused by failings in public service administration. Those of us in the sector know that the majority of the work that we do involves correcting wrong decisions by the DWP, housing benefit departments, HMRC …….. The list goes on.
The government believes that the advice sector is inefficient and that efficiency savings must be made. This was one of the reasons fixed fees were introduced in the first place. But, what both these reports find is that really it is the local/central government departments that should be getting their act together and that extra resources spent at an early stage getting things right will actually save huge amounts of time and money further down the line.
How refreshing!
Posted by lasaceo 
