Civil contracts

On this page:

The Unified Contract (Civil)
2010 Standard Civil Contract
Tendering for a 2010 Standard Civil Contract
Other civil contracts
Financial stewardship visits – guidance published
Other guidance
For more information

The Unified Contract

All our civil legal aid providers must sign a contract with us. Our Unified Contract (Civil) regulates how civil legal aid work is funded by the Community Legal Service (CLS). This makes sure we get competent, quality assured, best value contract work.

We keep providers updated about information affecting the contract via the CLS news page.

2010 Standard Civil Contract

The current Unified Contract (Civil) will be extended to 13 October 2010. The new 2010 Standard Civil Contract will come into force on 14 October 2010. Organisations will need to apply for and be awarded the new contract in order to carry out any new civil controlled and licensed work from 14 October 2010.

Standard terms and specification of the new 2010 Standard Civil Contract are available on the 2010 Standard Civil Contract page.

Tendering for a 2010 Standard Civil Contract

As announced in July, the current Unified Contract (Civil) will be extended for 6 months so will now expire on 13 October 2010. Providers will then need to successfully for a new 2010 to 2013 contract to work in any civil category.

The tender process for Immigration, Mental Health, Social Welfare Law and Family contracts has now closed. Other tender processes are now open. To find out more about how to tender for a new contract, including the deadlines, please go to our Tendering pages.

Following a 12-week consultation, Civil Bid Rounds for 2010 Contracts, we published our final policy in our response to consultation in June 2009. This sets out the approach we will take to the procurement and delivery of legal aid services from 2010 onwards.

Other civil contracts

The Unified Contract (Civil) replaces the Family Mediation and Immigration contracts. Cases started before 1 Apr 07 operate under the General Civil Contract.

Financial stewardship visits – guidance published

Relationship managers have been conducting financial stewardship visits as part of Phase 1 of our provider management strategy.

Visits began in April focussing on key areas identified by the National Audit Office to improve our internal controls. We're evaluating Phase 1 and will feed in the results to the next phase, due in autumn.

Following discussions with representative bodies, we've published the draft guidance document that supports this process. This will help to ensure that providers

are aware of what is likely to be covered during their visits
are clear about the steps that we are taking to manage the legal aid fund.

The guidance can be found in the Documents section on the right. There are ongoing discussions with the representative bodies who are feeding in their comments to support the publication of the final version.

Other guidance

Visit other pages on this website for guidance on working under the contract including:

In addition, we have recently published further guidance on administrative burdens which can be found in the documents section on the right hand side of this page, called "further contract guidance".

For more information

Visit the About us > Transforming legal aid pages for more information about legal aid reform.

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Last updated: 03 August 2010