Time to start being a bit more useful

Published: 20 Mar 2018

Andrew Taggart, lawyer at Herbert Smith Freehills, gave a speech at a recent Working Families event at the House of Lords about the importance of the work we do, and how volunteering on our legal helpline was the highlight of the year.

“Good evening ladies and gentlemen.  My name is Andrew Taggart.  I am a lawyer at Herbert Smith Freehills in London and I have been involved with Working Families since 1999.

It is a very great pleasure to be here with you all today.  You know things are changing fast.   We live in a world of change.  The silicon chip is changing our lives.  The quality of life is becoming more and more important.  The future of our children and our children’s children: these are today’s issues.

Those of you who are Yes Minister fans will instantly recognise those lines from Jim Hacker’s City Farm speech.  Those of you who haven’t got a clue what I am talking about, if you put Yes Minister and the speech into YouTube, you can enjoy some classic 80s comedy.

Although that episode of Yes Minister was written more than 30 years ago, those words are just as true now as they were then.  The issues of quality of life and the future of our children and our children’s children are very much the issues of today and they are at the heart of Working Families.

Finding me something useful to do

Those of you who know me are probably wondering what on earth I am doing giving a speech at this event?  I wanted to say thank you to Working Families for finding me something useful to do a couple of years ago at the start of my sabbatical.

I am lucky to have the chance to walk our daughters to school and one of the routes we sometimes take goes past the old Working Families offices in Beech Street in the Barbican.  One morning I mentioned to our daughters that I used to work there answering the telephone helpline and they asked, “Why don’t you do that anymore?”  I said that Working Families aren’t in those offices anymore and they asked, “Well why don’t you just go to the new offices?”  They also asked me what useful things I did.

I didn’t have any good answers to any of those questions and it made me think that it was time to start being a bit more useful.

It was the highlight of the year

The first month of my sabbatical was from the middle of June to the start of the school holidays.  I thought that Nicola (my wife) probably wouldn’t be keen on having me hanging around the house, so I asked Sarah Jackson if I could come and help for a month at the Working Families offices in Camberwell. She very kindly said yes.  It was a chance for me to see how Working Families operates, how the whole team works together and what an amazing service it provides with relatively meagre resources.  It was the highlight of the year.

Sarah gave me a project to come up with an idea for improving the partnership between Working Families and law firms and to make sure what I came up with was scalable.

We came up with the idea of a web-based platform which matches people who need pro bono advice on maternity related employment matters with lawyers who want to give pro bono advice and then looked at how to take away all the usual obstacles that stop people (lawyers in particular) from giving pro bono advice like conflicts of interest, liability insurance and flexibility of time commitment.  Thank you very much to the law firms that have signed up to the scheme which now provides hundreds of answers to maternity related employment questions every year.  If more firms sign up the scheme can provide thousands of answers or more.  The scheme can also be adopted by other charities and organisations to cover other areas of law and other jurisdictions, so it should be a globally scalable service.

If you would like to help with this, I’m sure Working Families would be delighted to hear from you.  As our daughters said, if even I can do something useful for Working Families, I’m sure you can too.

Thank you very much for listening and thank you very much Working Families.  It was a brilliant month and I’ll never forget it.”

If you are interested in volunteering on our legal helpline or our web-based email platform please get in touch.