Working to improve grant application assessment times

A big thanks to everyone who has participated in one of our Practitioner Network meetings over the past 18 months. We have heard concerns raised by our practitioners regarding delays in grants assessments and reduced responsiveness to enquiries. We want to provide an update on how we are tackling these issues.

Grants and Quality Assurance (GQA) are currently working through a high volume of grants applications. As such, you may be experiencing some delays in the assessment of funding requests. We appreciate your patience whilst we work through the large number of applications.

We receive approximately 70,000 requests for legal assistance each year (including new applications and requests for further funding) from approximately 530 law firms and our staff practice. Around 50 per cent of those requests are manually assessed by a GQA team member. Recently, our ability to complete assessments and respond to enquiries has been affected by staffing shortages.

To improve responsiveness and turnaround times, we are exploring improvements to our service design and preparing for the introduction of a new grants management system.

We view this as an investment in the future so we we can continue to operate effectively, efficiently and economically, to deliver legal aid services for a growing Victoria.

Some of the steps that we are taking to address the volume of outstanding grants applications and our responsiveness to enquiries includes:

• workforce and workload management
  • provision of overtime (in the short term) and recruitment strategies to decrease shortages due to staff movements.
• Practitioner Support team
  • practitioners with a general question about VLA funding guidelines, our fees and the use of ATLAS may email our Practitioner Support team directly at grantstraining@vla.vic.gov.au
  • increased education/training and the provision of resources for practitioners to reduce the volume of aid applications that ‘stop’ in ATLAS for manual assessment.
• service design
  • reviewing and updating our prioritisation framework for grants assessment matters
  • implementing new processes for identifying, escalating and addressing systemic issues.

While we are taking steps to address these issues, we know it will take time for practitioners to see the results of this work. We thank you for your patience and your continued commitment to legal assistance.

During this time, you may find our Tips for smooth grant application approvals in ATLAS | Victoria Legal Aid useful. The tip sheet runs through the ten most common reasons why a grant application may stop in our grants management system for manual assessment, as well as tips on how to avoid a negative assessment and quicken your assessment.