Urgent appeal – We need your help to save Advicenow

Welcome to Law for Life. We are the leading provider of public legal information and education in the UK that aims to tackle social injustice through the legal empowerment of individuals and communities.

Our legal help website, Advicenow, provides vital support to people across England and Wales. We receive 1,250,000 visits and more than 1.9 million page views. Demand has increased by 20% in the last year alone. 34% of Advicenow users identify as disabled, 51% are from low-income households. 28% are helping someone else - these include volunteers, advisers or friends and family.

For over a decade, Law for Life has received funding, either directly or indirectly, from the Ministry of Justice to maintain Advicenow. A recent decision has turned down our request for core funding completely with only a month to find other solutions. 

Why it matters

Often people come to Advicenow when they have nowhere else to turn – when they cannot access free advice or representation and cannot afford a solicitor. Our service users comes to us for help with benefits problems, eviction and other housing difficulties, complex family law problems, and help to deal with things like broken contracts and personal injury.

Our legal guides and tools help with disability benefit appeals providing step-by-step help and our personalised digital legal support tools write the letter to the DWP for you, setting out why the decision they made is wrong. Research soon to be published shows that claimants who use our tool to challenge their PIP decision  or DLA decision are more than twice as likely to get the decision changed at this stage than those who don't, saving them from waiting another 6 months for the appeal hearing.  ‘God-send’, ‘Can’t thank you enough’ and ‘Without your help, I would never have managed' frequently appear in the reviews our users leave .

Our resources are also very important in the ‘access to justice eco-system’ as volunteers, advisers, MPs caseworkers, pro bono lawyers, social workers, community workers and more use them to support their work with clients. Our resources are also linked to from sites as diverse as GOV.UK, Gingerbread, Scope, CAFCASS, Benefits and Work, MoneySavingExpert, and Mumsnet.

Why you should donate

We do have other funding coming in and as the year progresses we will get more. We receive generous continuing support for our education and training services to high need groups including vulnerable women, migrants and refugees, and people at risk of homelessness, who may not be able to make use of digital help alone. We also secure income from consultancy, research funding, and from some of the guides we sell (where we do sell a guide, we always make it available for free for those on low incomes). But trusts and foundations rarely want to fund keeping tried-and-tested successful resources up to date and available, or outreach campaigns so that we can get the help to those who most need it, or website support and hosting.  And without just a bit of help to get us through this unexpected patch, we will not be able to do that. We will have to shut down parts or all of Advicenow in the coming months.

We care deeply about access to justice and the individuals and communities we support to improve their lives. We want to continue to be here for them. Please donate today so that we can be.

June 2023