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Legal assistance for homeless people in NSW

Generally speaking, legal assistance may be provided in the form of plain language legal information, legal advice, initial legal assistance (such as drafting a letter in response to a claim) and representation in a court or tribunal. In NSW, legal assistance is provided to homeless people by a number of different agencies.

Legal Aid NSW, CLSs and ALSs are the primary legal service providers to homeless people throughout NSW, even though, generally speaking, legal service provision to homeless people by these agencies is not separately identified or specifically resourced. It has been argued in this report that LawAccess also has a major role in providing legal assistance to this client group and in linking isolated homeless people to other legal services.

In addition to these generalist agencies are the specialist legal services and clinics for homeless people: the LCRC, the HPLS, Shopfront and the legal clinics at the Exodus Foundation and Lou’s Place. These specialist services have been established to addresses many of the barriers faced by homeless people in accessing legal services (and include many features listed below). However, the majority of these services are pro bono services, which are most viable in city locations where there are high rates of homelessness and where there are law firms with the pro bono capacity to service these clinics. Specialist services are best examined as models of legal service delivery, rather than as the primary sources of legal support to homeless people in this State.

Given the particular legal needs of homeless people and the barriers they face in seeking assistance for those needs, it appears that homeless people benefit from legal assistance services that:

• are located in places frequented by or accessible to homeless people throughout NSW
• are in or have a less formal environment
• have longer appointment times to spend with clients
• are staffed with legal officers who are skilled in communicating with people with complex needs
• can provide continuity of service
• can provide timely legal advice and support (i.e. less waiting time for an appointment)
• have the capacity to address or coordinate a response to a range of legal issues
• can be coordinated with the provision of non-legal services (e.g. caseworker support, accommodation services, alcohol and other drug treatment)
• can assist and empower clients to address their legal rights.

Homeless people also benefit from early legal intervention, that is, legal assistance that is provided as soon as possible after the legal issue has arisen and before it has reached crisis point and affected other areas of their lives.

A structural feature of legal service delivery in NSW that seems to present difficulties for homeless and other disadvantaged people is that different legal issues tend to be separately dealt with by different legal services or practitioners. For instance, a duty lawyer may assist in a criminal matter, a grant of legal aid may be provided for a family law issue, a community legal centre may assist with a debt matter, and the Chamber Magistrate, the police or the Women’s Domestic Violence Court Assistance Scheme may assist with an AVO. This separation of legal service delivery is in contrast to the multiple and interrelated nature of the legal and other issues confronting homeless people. Not only must a homeless person potentially access a number of different legal assistance services, but the legal services provided are less likely to be coordinated. Each time the homeless person needs to access another legal service they are again potentially faced with the issues of cost, transport, finding documentation, overcoming their fear or lack of faith in the system and telling their story yet again to another busy service provider, who may only be able to deal with one of their legal issues. Thus, a system that offers separate legal services for different issues and lacks coordination between these services can, in and of itself, present a barrier to homeless people effectively addressing their legal needs.

In addition, while individual legal services may have relationships with local welfare and other services, legal services appear not to be routinely included in some ‘human service’ networks (which include community services, housing, welfare agencies), particularly at the planning/policy level. This again contrasts significantly to the experience of homeless people, where legal and social issues are usually intertwined. The separation of legal services from other human services, and the ‘siloing’ of legal matters within the legal services, makes it difficult to take a holistic ‘case management’ approach to clients. A ‘case management’ approach involves addressing the a client’s many complex needs as a package. To facilitate this, closer links need to be made between different legal services providers and between legal and non-legal services for homeless people.