Legal loophole

IT is the right of every individual to have access to legal aid if they cannot afford to hire their own solicitor. Equal access to justice is a central tenet of the judicial system, and this must remain so.

Yet this offers no mitigation for the "lax" financial controls that has been revealed at the Legal Services Commission, the taxpayer-funded quango which hands out more than 2bn a year in fees.

No public body should be immune from the need to provide efficiency savings, even more so as public spending contracts to help bring down Britain's record deficit.

Hide Ad
Hide Ad

This is now the challenge facing the Legal Services Commission which has allowed some solicitors to earn over 1m a year in legal aid payments, funded directly by the public purse.

Is it morally right, for example, that they can earn five times more than the Prime Minister each year for example?

No, it is not.

Another reason for imposing a salary cap, as advocated by today's Parliamentary report, is that it will increase the number of solicitors handling the more serious cases.

However, this will not happen when the Commission appears to have an inadequate grasp of the costs, and profits, of firms providing legal aid – and that this lack of knowledge contributed to its recent decision to abandon plans to introduce price competition.

Hide Ad
Hide Ad

Just like there is an expectation for solicitors to be fully appraised of the law, there's a requirement for the LSC to understand the concept of value for money – and appreciate that it is responsible for the allocation of vast sums of public money. And just because Gordon Brown cannot grasp this principle is not an adequate defence – it would, simply, be laughed out of court.