North East Law Centre 2022

North East Law Centre (NELC), is a charity established in 1978, and a member of the Law Centres Network (LCN). NELC provides free legal advice to people across the North East who cannot afford to pay for a solicitor and who are not eligible for funded legal advice through legal aid. Until recently our name was Newcastle Law Centre, but as we developed more work across the North East it became appropriate to change our name. We currently have 8 trustees, 21 paid staff and 4 volunteers. Continue Reading North East Law Centre 2022

North East Law Centre (NELC), is a charity established in 1978, and a member of the Law Centres Network (LCN). NELC provides free legal advice to people across the North East who cannot afford to pay for a solicitor and who are not eligible for funded legal advice through legal aid. Until recently our name was Newcastle Law Centre, but as we developed more work across the North East it became appropriate to change our name. We currently have 8 trustees, 21 paid staff and 4 volunteers.

We develop most of our work to support areas of law that are no longer funded by legal aid. For this reason, we develop services that are targeted at groups of the community who have the greatest need such as the unemployed and low paid, disabled people, BME communities, and women and children. We currently run a range of legal advice and representation projects in asylum, immigration, family, employment, welfare benefits, education and discrimination law, as well as targeted community legal education and employment work. We are funded by a range of charitable sources including the Access to Justice Foundation, the Ministry of Justice, the Home Office, Big Lottery Fund, Lloyds Bank Foundation, Baring Foundation, AB Charitable Trust, The Legal Education Foundation, and we also have grants from the Police and Crime Commissioner for Northumbria.

Also, we also provide a range of work to support organisations in the voluntary and community sector, including training programmes, development and partnership work to improve capacity and to develop new ways of working with clients.

NELC received 4247 enquiries, of which over 1600 came from people contacting the Law Centre for the first time in the year up to March 2022.

For further information, visit our website.