Rise in number of legal contacts on debt and family issues

The number of people inquiring about free legal advice increased last year, with family law issues and credit and debt problems prompting most of the contacts.

The Free Legal Advice Centre’s (FLAC) annual report, published today, showed 13,741 phone calls were made to its information service last year — up 10% on 2012.

There was a 6.3% rise in the number of people calling in to one of its 81 centres in 2013, meaning 27,546 individual contacts made to FLAC last year. In 2008, it dealt with almost 17,000 contacts.