Dangers of Grayling’s new world of justice on the cheap

I READ with interest the column by Bill Carmichael (Yorkshire Post, June 14) entitled ‘Case against legal aid waste’.

He appears to have completely misunderstood the arguments. It was not, as stated, “my learned friends being out in force in Parliament at a Commons Justice Select Committee”.

Your columnist refers to “even quite modest reductions...”. He makes no reference to the sort of reduction that is discussed in the consultation paper.

The reduction is an immediate 17.5 per cent cut in legal fees in order to prepare a bid for a contract in Chris Grayling’s 
new world of “justice on the cheap”.

As anyone unbalanced enough to consider bidding knows (and the only person who has declared he will do so is Eddie Stobart), the bid at 17.5 per cent less than current rates is just the starting point.

More likely, a successful bid would need to be 20 to 25 per cent less.

He mocks the fact that some barristers have to scrape by 
on a mere £500 a day for advocacy in court. Some, in 
this context, means a very, very small percentage. He fails to mention the many hundreds, 
if not thousands, at the junior 
end of the Bar, some of whom may scrape by on £14 per day.

He fails to mention the average wage of legal aid solicitors. It is £25k per annum. (For a nurse it 
is nearly £30k, for GPs it is £56k and for MPs it is £65k.)

Mr Carmichael’s biggest mistake is to rely on the MoJ statistics and trot out the same false argument that has been perpetuated by Mr Grayling for some time now, which is that justice in the UK is more expensive than anywhere else is the world.

In support of his argument, he trots out the false statistics that were either given to him by the MoJ or that he gleaned from the “man in the pub”.

Your columnist trotted out that “one London-based firm of solicitors raked in £15m in taxpayer-funded legal aid costs in a single year”. Did he do any research into this figure? Did it include VAT? Did it include disbursements (i.e. money which the firm had paid out to experts/agents)? Did he research how many cases the firm had actually dealt with?

His is a futile argument.

Anyone unfortunate enough to find themselves investigated by the police (this could and does include many law-abiding citizens) has the right to choose who should represent them. Under these so-called “modest proposals” they have no choice at all.

They will be represented by the very few who have bid sufficiently low to be able to deliver the cheapest possible service with the lowest possible quality for a fee which pays the same for a guilty plea (usually over and done with at the first hearing) and a trial (which may take many months of preparation and hours of hearing).

So the lawyer you don’t know, but who supposedly has your interests at heart, now has a very keen financial interest in disposing of the case as quickly as possible.