The NCC is working to extend access to justice for consumers, by campaigning for more effective ways of resolving disputes and new mechanisms for achieving redress. We have also campaigned successfully to open up the legal services market to greater competition and reform the way in which lawyers are regulated.

Current priorities include:

• Securing the effective implementation of the Legal Services Act
• Influencing proposals at national and European levels to introduce collective redress procedures
• Writing a 'fresh thinking' pamphlet about private sector ombudsman schemes
  

Lessons from ombudsmania

Ombudsmen rank as one of Britain's most successful imports and are expanding at pace into new markets. However, while individual schemes appear to operate well, there has been less scrutiny of how the system as a whole is working. NCC's fresh thinking pamphlet fills that gap, by taking a strategic assessment of private sector ombudsmen and examining some live issues that the schemes face. We conclude that the current ombudsman landscape, which reflects the emergence of schemes in a piecemeal fashion over the last twenty-five years, is increasingly out-of-step with the needs of the modern economy. We call for a single organisation - the Administrative Justice and Tribunals Council - to take strategic responsibility for the future development of ombudsmen of all types.

Click here for the pamphlet

Defusing the 'wills time bomb'

More than 27 million people in England and Wales do not have a will. A new NCC report - Finding the will -  makes disturbing findings: the people who need wills the most are among the least likely to have them; and there is a social divide in will ownership, with ethnic minority and low-income consumers far less likely to have a will than the rest of the population (12 per cent of people from BME groups have a will compared to 39 per cent of the rest of the population; and 27 per cent of people on low-incomes have a will, compared to 70 per cent of higher earners). Based on comprehensive research carried out in England and Wales, the report calls on industry and government to find effective ways of getting more people to make a will.

Click here for the press release.

Click here for the report.