Law Centre Director

Solidarity not Sympathy - Law  Centre Director

Greater Manchester Law Centre is looking to appoint a Director who shares our vision for the future.

More and more people are experiencing benefits cuts and sanctions, homelessness and escalating racism. The hostile environment affects both claimants and migrants. The survivors of Grenfell are entitled to justice.

Yet legal aid has been cut again and again. Law firms are deterred from taking restrictive legal aid contracts. Young social welfare lawyers have few places to practise. The people most in need of legal representation are least likely to be able to find - or afford - a lawyer.

Greater Manchester Law Centre started as a protest against cuts and closures. We have been open to the public for three years, providing a welcoming face-to-face service. We’ve provided support to people to challenge benefit decisions at tribunals, legal representation for people who are homeless or facing eviction, given expert employment law advice, and through all this we have been developing a new generation of social welfare lawyers.

But while we work with individuals, we have to challenge the policies which produce the hardships they and many others are facing in the first place. That is why we set out our purpose in our recently launched manifesto "Fighting Together for Free Access to Justice". We demand the restoration of legal aid, the legal right to a safe and secure home, and an end to the scandals resulting from Windrush and Universal Credit. Working together with the rightly-acclaimed Greater Manchester Immigration Aid Unit, we aim to be the leading voluntary organisation in the city-region promoting both challenges to government policy and improvements to advice and representation needed to make legal aid a reality and to empower those who are most affected by the current regime.

GREATER MANCHESTER LAW CENTRE DIRECTOR

We seek someone who shares our political outlook and has the skills and commitment to take the law centre in the direction set out in the manifesto, and who will work together with others, especially “user-led” groups of people directly affected themselves, to change government policies and end the hostile environment.

This means a clear and strategic senior manager, looking outward and upward,

• who can use the Manifesto to put forward both policy changes and service developments [the Manifesto is at www.gmlaw.org.uk
• who can work with others to increase our effectiveness with both the local decision-makers and the parliamentarians with whom we have already built good links, as well as with the universities, law firms, media and indeed the general public, and
• who can ensure that there will be financial and managerial sustainability for the law centre for the long-term future.

For an informal discussion, which we would encourage, please contact John Nicholson [13-27 July only] or Denise McDowell – johnnicholson@gmlaw.org.uk or denise@gmiau.org

For an application pack, please see www.gmlaw.org.uk

Applications to johnnicholson@gmlaw.org.uk by 12.00 noon Monday 5^th August 2019.

Interviews are likely to be held in the week beginning 12^th August 2019 (so please say if you have any difficulties with dates in that week).