Bill Carmichael: Case against legal aid waste

BRITAIN’S lawyers are in revolt over plans to reform the bloated £2bn a year legal aid budget. This week m’learned friends were out in force in Parliament at a Commons Justice Select Committee hearing, suggesting that even quite modest reductions in funding would result in the entire justice system collapsing round our ears. To paraphrase Mandy Rice Davies – well they would, wouldn’t they?

Even more remarkably, prominent QCs recently abandoned the Michelin-starred restaurants and expensive wine bars of the capital for a noisy street demonstration to demand hard-pressed taxpayers continue to subsidise their lifestyles. The details of their deprivation would make the hardest heart bleed. Some barristers have to scrape by on a mere £500 a day for advocacy in court, plus a measly £150 an hour for preparation work. If the Government succeeds in trimming £220m from legal aid costs, there are many poor lawyers who won’t know where their next BMW 7 Series is coming from. The demonstration outside the Ministry of Justice may have looked like a familiar bunch of entitled trade unionists demanding the right to continue greedily sucking at the public teat – because in effect that is exactly what it was.

But lawyers being lawyers, this nauseating show of naked self-interest had to be wrapped up in a load of sanctimonious guff about how their real concern was in ensuring justice for the less well-off.

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OK, perhaps the legal profession is populated entirely by saintly altruists, but that doesn’t explain why justice is so much more expensive in the UK than virtually anywhere else on earth.

According to MoJ statistics, legal aid costs the British taxpayer £39 a year per head of population. In France the equivalent figure is £5, Spain £5, Canada £10, Denmark £13, Sweden £15 and New Zealand £18.

Why does it cost Britain eight times as much as other western democracies to deliver justice? Where on earth does this vast amount of money go? Well, here’s a clue. One London-based firm of solicitors raked in £15m in taxpayer-funded legal aid costs in a single year, while 20 individual barristers each pocketed more than £300,000. No wonder they don’t want the system to change!

The proposed reforms are actually very modest. Lawyers would be required to bid for work (just like lesser mortals in the real world!), convicted prisoners would be prevented from making frivolous complaints and wealthy people would no longer be able to claim legal aid.

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And despite all the silly hysteria from the legal profession one crucial principle remains intact – a fully qualified lawyer would still be available at public expense to anyone who needed one.

Legal aid is nothing short of a lucrative racket – a kind of welfare benefit for the well-heeled middle classes – that has been disgracefully abused for years, and it’s about time it was radically trimmed.

BBC black hole

The decision by the Greek government to pull the plug on the state-owned Hellenic Broadcasting Corporation must have sent a shiver of apprehension through our own BBC. Bankrupt Greeks have decided that they can no longer justify pumping public money into a state broadcaster described as a “haven of waste”.

“Haven of waste” is a pretty accurate description of the BBC too. Recently the Corporation abandoned its Digital Media Initiative as “completely valueless” – after spending £100m on it. And London-based BBC staff were paid an astonishing £24m to persuade them to move to the £1bn MediaCity development in Salford.

Perhaps we should follow the Greek example and conclude that quite enough taxpayers’ money has been poured into this bottomless black hole.