Take Your MP to Work

7 July 2024 – We are excited to be working together with Migrants Organise on ‘Take Your MP to Work’, a campaign that looks to bring MPs and prospective MPs to the front-lines of legal aid. We placed this campaign on hold for the duration of the general election, and now with new MPs in post we are excited to be restarting our work.

We are calling on community advisers – whether from law firms or charities – across the country to partner up and invite your local MP to accompany to your place of work (be it a law firm, court room, or advice centre), see access to justice in practice and learn about the issues you work on. You can sign up to find more about the campaign using the form below.

The visit could take the form of them shadowing some of your work, organising a joint meeting with them and your community members, or them joining an event that you are putting on about your work – or whatever feels the best way to show why ensuring genuine access to justice and representation is important in your community!

Two visits have already been planned – with MPs Andy Slaughter and Bell Ribeiro-Addy visiting organisations in their respective constituencies – and our hope is for a wave of visits to happen over the coming months.

We are running this campaign because we are acutely aware of the scale of the crisis in legal aid and although worn down by it, with a new government in post, we need to capitalise on the power that we, as workers and communities, hold to put legal aid reform on the agenda. We first ran Take Your MP to Work in 2019, then in collaboration with the Legal Aid Practitioners Group, and had close to 50 MPs visit the legal aid frontlines.

The results of the election and a new government represent an important moment to come together and put our work and the challenges we face back on the public agenda, so that we can push for a well-funded, sustainable legal aid system.

We’ve created user-friendly guides, template emails and toolkits to help get you started, and the team will be holding drop-in sessions for interested participants in the following weeks.

To sign up to learn more about Take Your MP to Work, fill in the form below.

Once you’ve signed up, you’ll receive information about how to sign up for a ‘drop-in’ session with the campaign team, where we’ll talk you through the campaign and how to get started in arranging a visit with your local prospective parliamentary candidates. The drop in sessions are scheduled for Wednesday, 17 July at 14:30; Monday 22 July at 17:00; and Tuesday, 30 July at 16:30.

For questions (including media enquiries) please contact TakeYourMPToWork@gmail.com.