LSC Unified Contract and General Criminal Contract
This consultation closed on Tuesday 21 November 2006.
In our consultation paper Legal Aid: a sustainable future (published July 2006) we put forward a number of proposals concerning legal aid contracts from 1 April 2007.
In that paper, we said that we wished to introduce a Unified Contract on 1 April 2007, which would cover civil legal aid from that date (as the current General Civil Contracts expire on 31 March 2007).
The LSC has consulted with professional bodies on the terms of the Unified Contract. The final version of the Unified Contract includes changes resulting from the consultation process and will come into force on 1 April 2007.
A post-consultation report is available in 'The Unified Contract: Review of responses to the consultation' under Related Documents. It provides:
- A background to the report
- A summary of the responses to the draft contract clauses.
General Criminal Contracts will extend, automatically, from 1 April 2007 to 31 March 2008. However, we wanted to make some changes to the General Criminal Contract Standard Terms from 1 April 2007 and, in accordance with the terms of the General Criminal Contract, sent a consultation paper 'General Criminal Contract Information and Standard Terms Amendments 1 April 2007' to The Law Society, setting out our proposals for consultation.
The consultation has closed and the outcome is now available from the CDS > Consultations section.
To make it easier for current holders of our contracts, we have also published three tables with notes of the main differences between the proposed Unified Contract and the current General Civil Contracts and a question and answer document on the more important issue:
- LSC Unified Contract Notes on Policy Amendments
- LSC Unified Contract Notes on Housekeeping Amendments
- LSC Unified Contract Notes on Amendments to the Specification
- LSC Unified Contract Q&A.
All documents can be found under the Documents panel.
Last updated: 12 July 2007