Post by Patrick Torsney on May 11, 2012 9:29:39 GMT
From the LSC:
The LSC has published on 8 May 2012 a final draft of the Standard Terms to the 2013 Standard Civil Contract to give you notice of these in advance of the forthcoming civil legal aid tender exercise.
The Standard Terms are substantively based on the 2010 Standard Terms. The primary purpose of the amendments is to implement the requirements of the Legal Aid, Sentencing and Punishment of Offenders Act 2012. The amendments have already been consulted on with the legal representative bodies.
The Standard Terms form the commercial basis of our relationship with providers of legal aid services. They are the first of four Contract Documents (the others being the Specification, Schedule and Contract for Signature) that will be published for the civil legal aid tender exercise.
A table summarising the amendments we have made to the 2010 Standard Terms (including rationale) has also been published so that you can track and understand the changes we have made.
A final version of the Standard Terms will be published when the civil legal aid tender process starts. However, we do not expect there to be any significant changes to the final draft version of the Standard Terms between now and then.
We will apply the Standard Terms 2013 to all our contracts from the date that the contracts transfer to the Lord Chancellor (this is currently 1 April 2013)
You can download the final draft Standard Terms and the Summary of Changes from this page:
I don't know if you can shed any light on it - according to the LSC the "representative bodies" have already been consulted on the terms of it. I hadn't heard anything about any formal consultation process?
Post by Patrick Torsney on May 11, 2012 9:42:44 GMT
The rep bodies have indeed been consulted on it - this was going on even before LASPO became an Act. I don't know if there were restrictions on to whom they were allowed to circulate it or not
I'll be working through it shortly. If anyone has any views or questions on it please reply here
23.6 in the draft terms suggests that bidders will have to name a price as well as specify the number of cases ( or lots) that they are bidding for- or have I misread it?
Post by Patrick Torsney on May 15, 2012 13:14:25 GMT
Yes, that's interesting. However, you've got to bear in mind that the ST applies to all publicly funded contracts so is a bit of a catch-all and there are likely plenty of terms that could only apply to one type of contract even though this isn't clear initially from the drafting. This may be in there to address bidding issues in the telephone contacts perhaps
