Charitable activities

We have changed the method of initial contact for our clients from door callers to phone callers since our clients told us that they could never get through on the phone and that they would prefer to be able to telephone us. 80% of clients surveyed in our waiting room over two weeks said they would have preferred to phone in. When a client telephones, they have a 'Gateway Assessment' and their case goes for allocation to either a specialist or generalist worker. This change led to an 82% increase in access to our service in the first 3 months.

During the year, we continued:

• to give ongoing support for trainees recruited last year, and had a successful recruitment drive which has given us another 5 new advice workers for training.
• our Law Students Project, with 20 students working with us during the year. This helps us to reach out to younger people in our community.
• our placement scheme with a variety of local schools and our membership of the London-wide Youth Access Board which works to improve advice services for young people.
• our Housing Clinic for clients to see specialist housing caseworkers.
• our referral scheme at various outreach sites to help us to reach clients who might not otherwise access our service.

We also improved our service for clients at both Chessington and New Malden, to ensure that we see as many clients as possible, by introducing Gateway Assessments and offering appointments at these sites.

In order to provide an efficient staff structure and support for staff, we carried out a range of activities including a training programme for staff in-house, and produced an updated Health and Safety procedures handbook to ensure that staff have a safe working environment.

We continued to meet the targets set by the Legal Services Commission for our contract with them, achieving 101% at the year end against our performance target.

We engaged more in campaigning for change by offering support to advisers on this concept. Two staff were dedicated to the completion of evidence forms and work was undertaken with local MPs. We took part in various national campaigns, including highlighting bad practice on the part of bailiffs and the lack of availability of NHS dentists. A snapshot of 3 months work on our evidence forms shows 5 returns on employment, 11 on debts, 18 on benefits and 4 others. One recurring theme on debt cases was unreasonable practice on the part of creditors and on benefits there were several instances of delays in payments by the Benefits Agency. Our financial gains for clients recording shows over £1m for the financial year 2007-2008. This is money gained for the local economy and should be measured against our grant from the Local Authority of £268,000, and compares very favourably with the amount noted last year of £216,000. We also started to record outcomes for clients so that we will be in a position to demonstrate the beneficial impact of our work in the local community. We noted that 66% of the cases where we represent clients in court resulted in them not losing their homes -a very high success rate which compares favourably with the national figure of 30%.