The Legal Advice Service: A Lasting Legacy 

Published: 23 Jun 2026

When the Working Families Legal Advice Service was founded in 1999, the world of work for parents and carers was almost unrecognisable. More women than ever before were returning to work after having children, but policies and attitudes were lagging far behind, and very little support existed to help them balance the pressures of work with their responsibilities at home. 

The grassroots organisation that would become Working Families had already been supporting women in work for twenty years. It recognised that what people needed, more than anything, was someone in their corner. 

So the Legal Advice Service began. Not with a grand launch or a government grant, but with a telephone in someone’s house, a kitchen table, and the simple conviction that working parents and carers deserved someone who knew the law and cared enough to help. 

Twenty-seven years later, that conviction hasn’t changed. Almost everything else has. 

The legal landscape has shifted beyond recognition, from the introduction of parental leave and enhanced maternity rights in 1999, to flexible working becoming a day-one right in 2023. Through every change, the service was there. Not just explaining the law, but helping real people navigate difficult conversations with their employers, find the words they needed, and stay in the jobs their families depended on.  

When the pandemic turned the world of work upside down overnight, the helpline rose to the challenge, answering double its usual volume of queries while our information and guidance pages came to the aid of 1.6 million parents and carers in 2024/2025. 

Today, the website carries more than 200 legally up-to-date pages, visited by around one million people every year. Seventy lawyers from 17 law firms give their time pro bono. In 2024 to 2025 alone, we gave personalised advice to over 1,400 parents and carers. More than 1 in 10 UK parents visited our advice pages. Our advisers helped families access over £90,000 in unclaimed benefits. Ninety percent of callers said our advice helped them resolve their situation. 

The number that stays with us is that 26% of the people who called us were living in relative poverty, despite working. Two thirds of single parents who contacted us were too. 

Every statistic represents a family who came to us because they had nowhere else to turn, but who in the end, were able to make informed, meaningful decisions for their family.  

And this is what they said, afterwards: 

A leg to stand on. That’s it, really. That’s what twenty-seven years of this service has been about. 

Every call also did something else. It built a picture. The real struggles of real families added weight to every campaign Working Families ever ran, every argument made to government and employers, every push for the rights that working parents and carers now have. The right to request flexible working. The right to shared parental leave. The right to neonatal care leave and pay. These were hard fought, and the voices of the people who called this service helped win them. Every family that rang contributed to making things better for the families that came after. 

As Working Families closes its doors after forty-seven years, the Legal Advice Service leaves behind something that can’t be easily measured. The knowledge shared. The confidence instilled. The jobs kept, the incomes protected, the families held together at moments of real fear and uncertainty. 

To every adviser who picked up a call. Every lawyer who gave their time. Every colleague who kept an advice page accurate and accessible. Every funder who believed in it. And every parent and carer who trusted us with something that mattered enormously to them. 

Thank you. It has been an honour and a privilege to stand alongside working families for the last twenty-seven years.