CLS news

We are postponing the tender process for the new civil legal aid contracts until late 2009 or early 2010. 

New 3 year civil legal aid contracts will begin in Oct 2010. 

What does this mean?

We will extend current contracts for 6 months.

New timetable - more time

The bid round was due to open in Sept 09. 

Providers will have more time to decide whether they want to bid for the new contracts and prepare their tenders.

Tenders should be based on recently published policy in our consultation response document.

No overlap

Tender processes for Civil and Crime 2010 contracts will no longer overlap.

The bid round for crime contracts is still planned to commence in Oct 09. New contracts will take effect Jul 2010.

What is the new timetable?

We are preparing a new timetable for the civil contracts programme and we will keep you informed of key developments. 

We will continue to publish procurement plans outlining what we want to purchase in each procurement area.

Possible changes to new matter starts

However, we will consider whether to review new matter start data in advance of the bid rounds to reflect the latest available figures.

This may mean changes to the number of new matter starts available in a procurement area.

Howver we do not anticipate that these will be significant.

Where are the procurement plans?

Procurement plans are on the Civil 2010 Contracts tender pages .

Questions?

• the change to the timetable
• any aspects of our final policy proposals.

We have published a Q&A on our Unified Contract (Civil) 2010-2013 pages.

We will update this weekly with new questions received via this email account.

Read our press release.