Written by Chris Scutt, Senior Programme Manager at London Legal Support Trust
Our Parliament is in a summer recess, we’re mid-way through the school summer holidays, and the new football season is just around the corner. It’s a quieter time of the year for the Advice Workforce Development Fund (AWDF) as well, even if the need for social welfare advice hasn’t just disappeared because it is summer, and so we thought we would use the opportunity to share just a little of what the AWDF programme has been up to, as it enters its third year.
What we did
Research into Pay and Conditions
We successfully commissioned research in November 2024 which led to reports and key recommendations into Advice Sector Pay and Benefits and Conditions. The Pay & Conditions task-and-finish group oversaw the appointment of the Myriad Research Ltd, led by Ben Hickman, who produced two sets of recommendations (one for pay, and one for conditions aimed at different key stakeholder groups: the sector itself, funders of advice, umbrella/membership bodies, and others.
The AWDF programme, via the Steering Group and task-and-finish group, can now take this work forward, prioritising key recommendations, creating implementable guidance for different audiences, and influencing change within those groups. Click here to read more on the two reports.
Organisational Capacity Project
We commissioned a workforce-related organisational capacity project to explore challenges and solutions in this area. After a collaborative process by the Organisational Capacity Task and Finish group to develop a comprehensive tender with brief and spec, the programme tendered for a partner to carry out further research into the following areas:
- Training
- Supervision (technical, clinical, management, file reviewing)
- Peer support
- General approaches to recruitment and retention
In April 2025, we appointed Advice Services Alliance (ASA), with Phil Jew as lead researcher, to this work, which will be completed by October.
London-wide Advice Strategy Roadmap
As “the only space in the sector that involves so many voices and is so solutions focussed” (AWDF: One Year in… IVAR, 2024), the AWDF programme has continued to act as a host for ongoing plans to co-produce a London-wide Advice Strategy.
The first step was to commission some small-scale research, led by Helen Lang from Innovation Unboxed between November 2024 and May 2025, to identify potential themes for the strategy. This included desk-based research, six stakeholders focus groups (around 70 participants, and a workshop with the Strategy Action Group (Feb – May).
The research produced a draft vision statement, theory of change, and a suggester stakeholder engagement plan, which the cross-sector multi-stakeholder Strategy Action Group (formerly Strategy Task and Finish Group) will now take forward in the next phase of strategy development (autumn 2025).
The four suggested overarching themes for the roadmap are:
- developing a shared purpose and vision
- strengthening the strategic position of the sector
- fostering client-centred services
- joined up systems and practice
A small team of programme participants from the Strategy Action Group are working on creating a simple summary of the Roadmap deliverables, which will be available in our Resource Hub later in the summer. If you would like to find out more before then, please get in touch.
Helping Hands Conference
In June 2025, we hosted the first ever “Helping Hands: valuing the advice workforce” conference, alongside our colleagues/partners on the GLA-funded Advising Londoners Partnership.
We were particularly proud of how the Helping Hands conference gave Propel-funded Grow Your Own Advice (GYOA) and Deaf and Disabled People’s projects the chance to showcase the tangible learning on effective approaches to recruitment, retention, training and progression within the social welfare advice sector, including quick wins that organisations across the wider sector could adopt to diversify their workforce.
It also showed how GYOA models of workforce development and advice provisions are systematically transforming the sector.
Several delegates have asked for this to be an annual event, with one piece of feedback noting:
“It felt like the first time that advice workers were being truly valued”.
Read more about the conference here.
Propel Projects
So far, 386 individuals have participated in training and/or employment programmes across the eight AWDF Propel-funded projects, ranging from solicitor traineeships to NVQs in advice and guidance and casework supervision.
This included one disabled person who began as a volunteer within their organisation (a DDPO), even before Propel, is now training to become a supervisor, having progressed through the organisation’s pathways.
Many new advisers have lived experience of the challenges their clients or their communities are facing, which is enhancing the quality of advice provision.
While the programme’s main beneficiaries are the advice organisations, and individual participants, it is important to reflect on the wider purpose. The programme mission is clear:
To build a sustainable, effective and diverse advice workforce that serves Londoners at the point of need.
Participating organisations have worked hard in the last year to maintain, and even expand, their advice service delivery through the Advice Workforce programme. For example, one DDPO project supported 631 people to benefit from social welfare legal advice; while another project enabled more than 500 additional individuals to access justice.
Other Programme Activity
Lastly, we’ve recently created a “marketing the sector/skills academy” task-and-finish group (M&S T&F group) in direct response to the learning being generated by the eight AWDF Propel-funded projects. This group, still in its infancy, will confirm its terms of reference in September and act as a scoping group, assessing the feasibility of implementing a range of suggestions generated so far.
Next steps
As the programme moves into its third year, the focus will centre around three key areas:
- Influencing – encouraging stakeholders to implement the changes and recommendations generated by the programme.
- Implementation – putting the programme’s learning and recommendations into practice
- Sustaining stakeholder cohesion – building on the strong relationships developed over the course of the programme to date.
We expect the autumn to be a period of intense activity, as recommendations from a range of research work commissioned in Y2 come together. By the New Year, the programme should be well placed to begin influencing diverse audiences to adopt the most significant recommendations from each piece of work. Different partners will lead in different areas, some using their policy and campaigning expertise to drive change, while others will draw on their roles as membership or infrastructure bodies to enable sector-wide improvements, such as creating template pay policies aligned with the Pay Report’s recommendations.
