“We’ve heard people tell us, ‘You’ve saved my life’. Pro bono support can genuinely have that impact”

I remember shortly after joining NCLS, I fully was able to understand the value that legal support can bring. We helped a young woman in her early 20s with two kids who was in court with her former partner.

Courtrooms are scary places, and she couldn’t afford legal support, so she was going to have to represent herself. A volunteer was able to help the young woman to prepare for her court proceedings; going through what she was going to say and the questions she would face. They sat next to her in court, took notes for her, and could be a physical presence, which is a big thing. They could also act as a reassuring voice in her ear when the judge asked questions.

A couple of months later, the young woman came to our office to tell us she got what she wanted: shared custody rights for their children. She was overwhelmed by the support she’d had. Because the courts are progressing so slowly, we'd been there for her right through a six-to-nine-month process.

Without that support, I don’t think she would have had a chance. She certainly wouldn’t have had access to justice, and she wouldn’t have had a fair hearing.

Rooted in community kindness

NCLS was founded in 1985, when a small group of unpaid volunteers came together to fill gaps where local people were unable to access justice. We’ve continued to grow as the need of the community has grown.

This year, as we celebrate our 40th anniversary, we have nearly 40 members of staff and 180 volunteers. We have specialist teams in several key areas, including debt, welfare benefits, immigration, family, and domestic abuse.

We also offer a service, powered by solicitors, that provides clients with between 15 to 20 minutes of free legal advice on a range of civil law matters. The most popular areas are housing, employment, and wills and probate.

Free legal advice: powered by solicitors

Often, someone will come to us and say, “This is my problem. Have I got a legal case?” We give them a bit of guidance as to whether they do. We’ll then help them figure out their next steps.

Our Free Legal Advice service is supported by dozens of volunteers from across the legal profession – solicitors are involved in almost half our overall cases at NCLS. For example, we might have a client with a child custody request. After being assessed by a solicitor, we can determine whether that person receives further support from our family team.

If we don’t have the resources to support a client further, solicitors can empower an individual to make informed choices about what to do next with their concerns. They often come away from the conversation with a voice and a plan.

And sometimes a client needs an expert opinion to understand when they haven’t got a case. We’ve seen situations where clients receive hard truths that help them move on with their lives. Disputes can dominate someone’s life, and the right advice can save them years of further stress and struggles.

We added up the monetary value of all the hours of volunteer support we received from solicitors last year, and we’re very fortunate to be able to say it came to over £200,000. Many solicitors have supported us for over a decade because they’re passionate about their work and the impact it delivers.

In some cases, a solicitor offers an assessment and ends up taking on a case pro bono in their own time. An issue will get under their skin; they see a massive injustice and decide to get stuck in and go above and beyond. That kind of support is off our books, but it shows how invested many of our volunteers are in local issues. 97% of our Free Legal Advice clients felt their adviser ‘listened carefully’ to their problems.

Good pro bono legal support is all about impact. Time is short. We want people to be coming away from their session thinking, “I now know something about my rights that I didn't know before.” That’s it in a nutshell. It’s about making a difference – and people feeling like they’re closer to getting access to justice.

‘My kids can eat’: bringing justice to the community

We’ve had people tell us, “You’ve saved my life”. Pro bono support genuinely can have that big an impact.

Almost 30% of the people who come to us have mental ill health, and the legal issues they’re facing have affected their wellbeing. We unfortunately do see people who are thinking about suicide because they’re really, really struggling.

We work on around 200 welfare rights appeal cases each year. These currently sit outside the remit of our pro bono legal advice, but the feedback illustrates how free legal support and overcoming injustice can make a massive difference. We get comments like, “You've given me a voice” and “My kids can eat now”.

Often, the Department of Work and Pensions (DWP) has probably spent quite a small amount of time assessing a case. The DWP may tell people they’re not entitled to support. But when many of those same people come to us, all too often we don’t believe the decision on the case is fair.

In court, we win our cases 82% of the time. That’s 165 out of 200 cases where a judge has looked over the findings and told the people we help, “The DWP are wrong. You have a right to these benefits”. If that represents how often people are being improperly assessed across the whole country, that’s disgraceful.

Because a case takes around a year to reach an outcome, you’ve got people who have spent all that time with no benefits, not being able to work, struggling to feed their families or to heat their homes. A benefit, whether it's £200 a week or month, can be transformational.

There are stereotypes around the benefits system, and we’ve all heard people get called ‘sponges’. Yes, there are a few who cheat the system, but in the majority of cases, people have had something happen to them – something that none of us would want to happen to us or a loved one. They need a helping hand because they’re struggling, and if you or I were in that situation, we’d want that support to be there for us as well.

In 2023 to 2024, our welfare benefits team recouped £2.4 million for people in Norfolk who have been wrongly denied a benefit. £2.4 million! The wider impact of that is money going into the pockets of local families, but it’s also money then being spent in the shops, in the supermarkets – it's being pumped back into the economy. It costs £1.4 million every year for NCLS to operate, so through just one out of our five teams, we’re bringing an extra £1 million to our community.

If a business was recouping that much money and investing it back into Norfolk, which is effectively what we’re doing, it would be a fantastic success story. So that’s how we look at it. We’re changing people’s lives and benefitting the county.