Our experience providing legal advice during the pandemic - picking up the pieces

This week our Trustee Keith Wilding and CEO Sue Bent feature in the New Law Journal. They assess the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic and question the wellbeing of the poorest in society both now and in the post-lockdown world.

If you have retained your stamina and you are coping with your anxiety then you are probably still watching the media coverage of COVID-19 and aware that it is telling us about the devastating and disproportionate effect on the poorest in our society. This is a truism that is very evident to those in the social welfare law sector which has spent years trying to combat and ameliorate the effects of austerity and is now picking up the pieces from the effects of the coronavirus outbreak.

The Central England Law Centre (CELC) is the largest law centre in England with operating centres in Coventry and Birmingham and, along with other social welfare agencies, is in the forefront of the battle to counter some of the worst effects of the social consequences of the outbreak. Among other things, the dedicated workers get referrals about the most marginalised in society who no one else knows how to help. There is no space here to chronicle the widespread misery of individuals and families—the family living outside the system in a caravan on a farm and being paid cash in hand, a group of men with no financial or other resources who have probably been trafficked and abandoned by their gangmaster—but it is important to set out the effect on CELC’s clients, on its staff, and on the organisation itself and the system in which it operates.

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