The incumbent government is desperate to stop money haemorrhaging out of the Treasury.  They try to pick on some area of the economy where the potential recipients of funds are not too militant – they don’t want miners flame throwing Downing Street; not too likely to generate yards of ‘heartless Tory’ newsprint – no use trying to save money by refusing to service wheelchairs; not likely to vote Tory anyway – (they don’t worry about the Lib-Dems, they’re toast as it is); and hopefully no one will notice – or care – until it is too late.

The ‘Law and Order’ arena is a good hunting ground for them, you don’t notice the effect for a year or two, and then you can get brownie points before the next election by giving everyone a pay rise.

They’ve slashed the entry salary for Police Officers by 20% – not many ordinary people actually care how much Police Officers are paid, serving Police Officers are more concerned with their pension, those hoping to get a job in the Police force are hardly likely to start throwing Molotov cocktails in Downing Street, and with half the country out of work anyway, the newspapers aren’t inclined to campaign for a higher starting wage for those lucky enough to get a pensionable job. So far so good.

They’ve slashed the number of Police Stations drastically, threatening to put Police officers in Tardis type Police boxes rather than stations with canteens and somewhere to park your civvy clothes, and an office biscuit box…..they even toyed with the idea of making them stand at the end of the aisles in Tesco’s – report that historic sex attack whilst you’re waiting for the doughnut counter to be loaded up again – which generated a flood of ‘aisle be having you’ and ‘cell-by date’ jokes.

But Police patience can only be stretched so far, so now they have moved to the other end of the Law and Order scale. The ‘criminal defendant’. Note defendant. They could well yet be innocent, but that doesn’t matter in these days of celebrity policemen acting as judge and jury. They intend to save some 220 million a year by cutting legal aid to those ‘criminal defendants’. Who cares about them, they’re criminals aren’t they? Well, not until they’ve been tried and convicted actually, and it is long before that that they, and the totally innocent, need their legal aid, but most people won’t bother to separate the words criminal and defendant into their specific meaning.

The intention is to cut the number of firms that can offer legal aid advice from 1600 to 400, split into 42 different areas. Or 10 per area.

“This would mean current providers would need to grow their business on average by around 250% (or join with other providers to create sufficient resource to deliver the expected caseload),” the consultation said.

250%! A tough requirement in the current economic climate. They only want the ‘big boys’ to tender under this ‘price competitive tendering’ model.

They have removed the old requirement that you had to consult a solicitor, incurring his fees, before being allowed to consult a barrister. Solicitors were gate-keepers, rather like GPs. They listened to the long fangled whine regarding where your Aunt Minnie was last Thursday, and how it was the day you usually took the cat to the vet – extracted the essential information – that you had been done for speeding on your way to work, and fired you off in the direction of a barrister that specialised in speeding offences. 

Now you can go to a Barrister directly – but how are you supposed to know which Barrister specialises in speeding offences? He can’t afford expensive ads on afternoon TV, “Give us £2 a week and you could save a Barrister from penury” – and even more to the point, where is he supposed to find the time to listen to Aunt Minnie’s whereabouts for the past three months, and the likelihood of your cat surviving Christmas? He’s used to being given a précis form of important details, preferably at least ten minutes before he has to defend you, and then speed away to his next case leaving your solicitor to listen to your howls of anguish at finding yourself banned from driving for ten years. Barrister don’t all earn a fortune you know. Most of them spend their day roaring round the country on Virgin rail hoping to cover their train fare.

Hmmn, pondered the government – someone has to do the hand holding role, make sure you end up with the right sort of barrister, and dry your tears afterwards – but does it need to be an expensive solicitor? I don’t think so, said our current venerable Lord Chancellor Chris Grayling, and opened the field to all players. Actually it was Labour which started all this off.

The role of ABSs in legal aid work was foreshadowed in March 2009 by the then Labour Lord Chancellor, Jack Straw, in a major speech on the future of legal aid. He said: “For law firms to survive they will have to look to how they are structured and how they operate. The introduction of the Legal Services Act has meant that new opportunities are there for firms who are able to adapt to the changing demands of the new legal market-place.

“Currently, 80% of all legal aid is carried out by firms with fewer than four partners, and nearly a third is undertaken by sole practitioners. But no firm, large or small, will be able to stand still in the face of the innovation which new business models will be able to bring.”

Some remarkable players are in the running. Tescos, not surprisingly, they already aspire to have PC Plod stationed between the Turnips and the Toilet Cleaner. But what is this? Your friendly Eddie Stobart Lorry, with his well dressed drivers, unloading a fresh supply of flat packed Barristers to Liverpool Crown Court? They cannot be serious! They are. 

Stobart’s Group Legal Director was once the practice manager at a well known firm of solicitors, and reckons he knows how it all works well enough; he’s set up Stobarts Barristers and is chomping at the bit to bid for one of the franchises.

Beware the flat pack Barrister delivered to your home – it will arrive with a few screws missing, and an incomprehensible instruction sheet. Not that it really matters any more, the Police will already have pronounced you guilty. Still, most defendants will probably jump at the chance to get a Zimmer frame and a walk-in bath delivered at the same time…

You couldn’t make it up.

Flat-pack barristers waiting to be delivered to the next crime hot spot.

miss mildred
May 8, 2013 at 10:17

I didn’t do legal, apart from 14 years in Citizens Advice. All I know is
that legal aid has, in certain circs to has/had be repaid. The shocked
divorcee who gained a house and a debt to repay her legal aid. She does not
understand the pay back system behind triumphantly getting the house. The
awardee, dragging out disability benefits, finds the compensation for, what is
mainly his/her own carelessness, finds they have to pay some of it back. I am
silently laughing up my cuff at the anger at being parted from several
thousand quid of ill gotten gains. I feel all the more noble for, I hope,
soothing someone for whom I instinctively think is on the take, and a tiny bit
is out of my taxes. Lawyers are surely very useful. A port in a storm. The
trouble is they want such a lot of money for even quite slight work. What
about an ideal world where people do not take drugs, drive too fast, thieve
and fight and drink far too much? If only they would stay married, like us,
for nearly fifty years. They would save themselves so much bother. Oh I am so
naive! It is just as ‘pigs might fly’ as all the other stuff about the EU
creeping up on us. Economics will dictate, and have done so for many years in
legal aid matters.

Dave May 5, 2013 at 21:29

I work in a solicitors office. We gave up on legal aid years ago. Our town
has a population of about 60,000. There are no legal aid practices. There are
two in local towns. That makes two firms serving more than 200,000 people.
Needless to say there’s a waiting list.
I read the Law Gazette regularly
and read the comments posted online by world weary solicitors lamenting the
state of the profession. The SRA is supposed to regulate us, but frankly they
couldn’t organise a piss up in a brewerey. Two large firms went bust recently
and the SRA wants to rob the Intervention Fund to cover their shortfall. If a
firm of solicitors tried to use client money to prop up their firm’s finances
there’d be hell to pay, but the SRA is above all that, so that’s all right
then.
No legal aid. No referral fees- which mean dozens of Personal Injury
law firms will go bust this summer when the work dries up. Long standing firms
calling it a day. When will it end? and why is it happening?
Has it not
occurred to anyone that the UK has a different legal code than the rest of the
EU?
In the UK a person is innocent until proven guilty. In the EU, under
the Napoleonic Code, a person is presumed guilty until he can prove his
innocence. The constant drip drip of over the top regulation and withdrawal of
legal aid is designed to reduce the size of the legal profession so that at a
point in the not-to-distant future the UK’s law will be harmonised with the
rest of the EU.
They’re doing it with the imposition of gay marriage across
the EU.
We are getting HS2 because someone in the SNCF decided it would be
a good idea.
We don’t get a say.
Or do we?
Don’t say I didn’t warn
you.

Ted Treen May 6, 2013 at 22:17

I was told by a solicitor friend some years ago, that under the
continental system, everything is prohibited except that which is expressly
permitted, whereas under the UK system, everything is permitted save that
which is specifically prohibited. I don’t know how accurate that is, but it
also depends on the attitude of the country’s police & judiciary towards
enforcement.

JoBlow May 7, 2013 at 00:03

I sat through 2 cases in France which involved friends. It was an
education.

One was a fraud matter and he was found , rightly, guilty. He admitted
as much. The other was an alleged assault and he was found not guilty, or
rather, the case wasn’t proceeded with.
Watching a judge sifting
through the facts and trying to ascertain the truth, rather than a
prosecutor using every trick in the book (or the defense counsel), was
illuminating.
there was far less theatre and far more attempts to find
the truth, a lot less fights over “points of law”.
We have been
educated to believe our system of law is the greatest in the world yet it
is easily sidetracked as in the USA where money really makes the
difference between winning and losing.
It is an arrogance to blindly
believe our system is never to be questioned.

Ho Hum May 7, 2013 at 00:10

You might also have included the notion that others have that it should
also be dependent on their opinion, such as Mad Hattie’s Court of Public
Opinion or the Right Minds of the men and women of Arnos Grove

JoBlow May 6, 2013 at 23:55

The inquisitorial system can be far superior .

Our adversarial system pits 2 parties against each other in an effort to
win at all costs. The inquisitorial code generally removes the police from
the investigative role at a certain point and hands over to a
magistrate.

It is an illusion to say we are “innocent unless proven otherwise” : we
have a media and police who daily try to remove or influence the concept and
politicians take note and are influenced by them.
The Savile matter has
been a whole scale assault on this concept and it has been blindly accepted
by the media who unquestioningly have pronounced Savile guilty on no
evidence.
That should worry everyone including clueless journalists but
apparently does not.

Witness the arrest of a politician the other day with police outrageously
proclaiming how “brave” it is for the victims to come forward. Coded
language to all that the MP is guilty and there are victims. No ‘alleged’
victims but confirmed victims yet not one word from our media, rather they
report these utterly outrageous words from arresting police who should never
say these things but today, get away with it.

Surely the unique evidence that Britain has a repulsive media ( a
reflection of society) that convicts in the Court of Public Opinion and most
of Europe is not obsessed as we are, shows our system is at fault and is
failing,

Psychonaut99
May 5, 2013 at 12:54

I was thinking much the same thing. The Lord Chancellor has stated, on the
record, that when it comes to legal representation for poor folk, it merely
needs to be at an “acceptable” standard. It will be interesting so see whether
that standard is considered good enough for his mate. Were I a betting man,
I’d wager a fair sum that should the Deputy Speaker’s case make it to court
there’ll be a QC and at least one junior there to look after him.

rabbitaway May 5, 2013 at 11:51

I should add that the man has been arrested and bailed and is denying the
claims made against him. Let’s see how his case is handled in comparison to
the other chaps – interesting !

rabbitaway May 5, 2013 at 11:43

I daresay that the Deputy Speaker of the House of Commons’ barrister will
be delivered to him fully assembled, carefully tracked by GPS and will arrive
at the appointed minute – no waiting in all day for him !

Andrew S. Mooney
May 5, 2013 at 11:03

Anna:
You never go a Barrister directly. You find his CLERK and start
with him – He’s the Practice Manager by another name.
http://notabarrister.wordpress.com/2012/10/31/what-is-a-barristers-clerk/

The quiet purpose of a Barrister’s clerk, beneath it all, is to find his
Barrister work. Having one used to be a legal requirement, because of the
issue of the moral aspect of taking a client’s money. This being Britain that
issue has since been dropped but they continue to retain them, owing to the
inside knowledge they possess of who is the right man for the job in respect
to any particular specialism of law. Barristers continue to retain them
precisely because of the need that they have to have someone to run their
lives for them in respect to the day to day details of their existence.
They’re a hidden source of real power in the legal profession.

Have a read here: http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1002107

“As long as the Bar is organised in it’s present fashion, there will be
clerks. However, if the Bar decides to exercise it’s freedom to engage in
“alternative business structures” as recommended by Clementi, then new systems
can be created. But, as one clerk presciently told me, “Under Clementi I could
open ‘Barristers ‘R Us’, employ them, give them 28 days holiday and BUPA, and
pay them f40k a year.”

Chris
Barratt May 5, 2013 at 01:38

I completed a Law degree fairly recently – most of the graduates now, in
common with their whole generation, wouldn’t complain if solicitors were paid
the minimum wage.
As for the police, the PCSO’s have helped create a
profession of bovine imbeciles – they no longer require police to be
streetwise or even halfway intelligent.

Four years ago, I was travelling down a dual carriageway close to my house
on my way home, it was just starting to turn to dusk. A panda car flew up
behind me with blue lights on, the officer driving clearly practicing for a
stint in Traffic. They pulled me over, game to my window and asked me to get
out of the car and sit in their vehicle. A PCSO got out to around my car,
though he appeared to not know what they hell he was looking at or for, and I
was asked if I knew why I had been pulled over. I said no – and was informed
one of my rear lights was out (it was only just getting dark). I explained I
live 300 yard away, but nonetheless I was unaware of the defective light but
could – as I had a spare bulb and a Philips screwdriver in the vehicle –
correct the vehicle there and then.
“Oh no” said the PC “don’t do it now. I
will have to give you a vehicle defect ticket and you must get an MOT station
to do the repair in the next seven days” So you don’t want me to repair the
fault right now? “No you can’t”
To compound the surreal idiocy, the
grinning PCSO returned to the police car having gawped at my car – which was a
30 year old recently restored classic in showroom condition.
“Seems
alright, mate” he said “It’s in good condition, how old is it?”
“Exactly 30
years old”
“Hey, that’s alright. You’ll be able to get two grand off a new
car from the government”
“What, scrap it you mean?”
“Yeah mate, I
would”
“It’s worth £8000″
“Is it?”
I thought about telling this
gormless retard that umpteen others too, but feared if I did that I would
probably be putting myself into further compromise as these two didn’t have
half a brain between them.
Sign of the times?

davidb May 4, 2013 at 21:07

A good way of saving legal aid money would be to abolish all the petty
stupid rules and regulations we are assaulted with. We cannot transgress laws
if there aren’t any to transgress. I suggest we start with all the green guff,
then look at all the motoring guff. Then all the stuff aimed at making us
better people – your smoking bans come into this ( even though I agree with
the restrictions ). Then we could legalise all the stuff people actually do –
like taking drugs or trespassing private property or parking on yellow lines (
if its left under motoring offences ) for 5 minutes, swearing at policemen or
any other public official, using abusive language under any circumstances,
etc. We could get creative – make human rights only apply to UK citizens for
instance ( if we need an act at all once we free the people from the
executive). I’m sure your readers can think of hundreds of things we are not
allowed to do any more.

As to the police. I really only encounter them being a nuisance messing
with motorists ( ie tax collecting by any other name ), or queuing for food at
Asda. If we had a lot less laws to transgress we could get by with even less
of them

Roy Fernley
May 4, 2013 at 23:36

I’ll assume this is tongue in cheek but just in case you actually mean
it:

Laws serve the common good by establishing where the edges of the
envelope of acceptable behaviour are. Abolish those and we couldn’t stand
upright in the whirlwind of anarchy that would follow. For example would you
want a mob stoned on illegal drugs entering your front garden and chanting
davidb is a mother*:@£$r for hours on end? Could you cope with the chaos
that would ensue if traffic regulations were not enforced?

davidb May 5, 2013 at 08:55

Nah, I’m serious.

I don’t get mobs out front pissed on legal drugs now chanting anything.
I don’t have any reason to suppose that if other drugs were legalised I’d
experience any new phenomena. I would maybe have to fear for the fruit on
my apple trees from hungry hash heads. Oh, and I only take alcohol, for
the record .

Its estimated that we will spend over 1% of our life looking for a
parking space http://www.yourcoverinsurance.co.uk/en/about_us/press_office/8hours.html
. Maybe we would live longer without such stress. A less adversarial
approach to cars in other societies did not result in anarchy http://www.queerid.com/topic.aspx?topicid=27653 . So hows
about we think out of the box?

There is no law to tell me I should own an iphone, or wear Nike
trainers. I am not compelled by law to buy organic eggs or fairtraded
coffee. Yet those are all “acceptable” behaviours. I suggest that we need
less laws to set us free. People in the main don’t drink and drive. It is
frowned upon. It is socially unacceptable. As is drinking at lunchtime or
displaying girlie calenders. Yet the latter two are not illegal. I suggest
that racism is heading the way of social unacceptability, and so is
domestic abuse. Laws are not necessary, except to oppress us and extract
money for the state while providing pensionable employment for its staff.

Laws seem to exist in our country to maximise the revenue for the
state. The greatest advocates of public service broadcasting are the BBC,
the source of work for lawyers is laws passed by other lawyers in
legislatures, the most vocal people advocating anything really ought to
have their motives scrutinised.

So no, I am deadly serious.

Ho Hum
May 5, 2013 at 12:51

‘ As is drinking at lunchtime or displaying girlie calenders. Yet the
latter two are not illegal.’

Let me fix that for you:

‘As is drinking at lunchtime or displaying girlie calenders. Yet the
first is not illegal while the second may be in certain
circumstances.’

And you can be sure that there are, out there, zealots working away
to achieve the aim that they both are, everywhere.

Most laws these days are there to satisfy the demands of some
pressure group which perceives its own sense of victimisation or
offendedness to trump the freedom of everyone else to get on with their
lives in peace, by making whatever it was upset them unacceptable and
forcibly illegal, regardless of how innocently it is practised or lived
with by the many, so that the one of the many who really oversteps the
mark can be ensured to be absolutely guilty with no hope of defense or
absolution. And if they then makes a whole bunch of other ordinary
innocents guilty of a ‘crime’ too, so what? By definition, they don’t
like them either.

The only hope of anyone stopping this sort of nonsense would be for a
force, like UKIP, to rise up and say we have had enough of this twaddle,
but the unfortunate thing is that the loons who support UKIP and the
like seem, in their ignorance, hell bent on actually throwing away the
one legislative prop that, in the absence of anything like, say, the US
Constitution, has any hope of protecting individuals’ personal legal
rights in this country, ie the EHCR, based on the UNDHR.

Twattery is without limits, it seems

Psychonaut99 May 5,
2013 at 13:07

Drink driving is easily the charge I deal with most often when I’m
court duty solicitor. The fact its socially frowned upon does not seem
to have prevented people from doing it. Ditto for domestic violence.
Obviously, one could argue that the fact they’re both illegal hasn’t
prevented people from doing them either, but the sentence might at least
deter them from doing it again (the drink-drivers anyway. Most genuine
spousal abusers I act for are such thorough-going arseholes that they
perceive their convictions as being the fault of the victim).

Mudplugger
May 5, 2013 at 09:06

But we only need one piece of traffic regulation – Inappropriate Use of
a Road Vehicle.
Exceeding an arbitrary speed-limit is not always
dangerous, parking on a pedestrian crossing is not always dangerous etc. –
it should be left to a police officer to decide of he considers your
action to be inappropriate at the time and to issue a summons, it is then
up to you either to accept the charge or defend it. That would wipe away
all the petty, cash-cow traffic laws at a stroke and may even lead to more
responsible driving overall.

Psychonaut99 May 5,
2013 at 13:11

The very, very last thing you want is having all road traffic
offences being defined by the whim of a police officer. All you’d end up
doing is replacing a statutory framework with an and hoc framework of
case-law that would be even more complicated than what we have now.

Ho Hum
May 5, 2013 at 13:21

But wouldn’t “The Offensive Offence of the Offended Plod” not just
merely be a mirror image of some of our other recent legislation,
where the offence is in the subjectively perceived offendedness of the
victim?

If our legislators had no trouble creating that, do you think that
they would pause for 2 seconds about letting Plod loose in his own
judgement, given that seem to have spent less time thinking very hard
about the consequences of the opposite variant?

I wish that was just entirely frivolous cynicism…….

Roy Fernley May 4, 2013 at 20:05

“Defend the children of the poor and punish the wrongdoer”. I always
thought that the statue of Justice atop the Old Bailey was blindfold to save
her the anguish of seeing the perversions of justice that took place beneath
her feet.

With these developments it’s just as well she can’t see!

Psychonaut99
May 4, 2013 at 17:54

It’s even worse than that, Anna. The firms that get contracts will have
clients allocated to them, and the client has no choice in who represents him
or her. In other words, the contract holder will be guaranteed to get clients
no matter how bad a service they provide.

In the magistrates court, the fee for a case will be fixed, no matter how
much work is involved, unless the Defendant puts in an early guilty plea, in
which case the firm gets a bonus payment. Yes, you read that right.

So, if you’re accused of a crime, and aren’t enormously wealthy, you will
be compelled to have a lawyer chosen for you by the State, who got the job by
offering to do it as cheaply as possible, who has no financial incentive to do
a good job, who cannot lose custom if he does a bad job, and will be paid a
bonus if he pressures you into pleading guilty.

Roy Fernley
May 4, 2013 at 23:46

I live in NZ and whilst not fabulously wealthy do not qualify for legal
aid. I was falsely accused of a crime of which I was charged. I had to pay
for my own lawyer. The case dragged on for over a year before it was finally
dropped. I was offered several opportunities to plead guilty early on in the
process and was encouraged by my lawyer to consider doing so. It was put to
me as a pragmatic choice, to get the matter over with and move on, even told
that an early guilty plea would result in a discharge without conviction due
to previous good character. All of this I refused because I would not plead
guilty to something I hadn’t done and lower myself in my own eyes. The
financial cost of this put me into a hole which ultimately has lead to my
bankruptcy and the failure of my marriage.

The irony that a guilty plea would have cost me less in the long run
isn’t lost on me.

low resolution
fox May 6, 2013 at 10:40

I heard a barrister recite the above as an appalling breach of justice
and ethics.

I had to step back and say from a non-legal persons opinion
(engineering actually), the current system looks inefficient, expensive,
encourages wasteful court cases over trivial matters, and being honest a
lot of people would never spend the money on legal aid if the government
did not steal taxes and hand it to lawyers, mostly to be spent protecting
those quite feasibly likely to be a scumbag.

lowresolutionfox May
6, 2013 at 10:42

I heard a barrister recite the above as an appalling breach of justice
and ethics.

I had to step back and say from a non-legal persons opinion
(engineering actually), the current system looks inefficient, expensive,
encourages wasteful court cases over trivial matters, and being honest a
lot of people would never spend the money on legal aid if the government
did not steal taxes and hand it to lawyers, mostly to be spent protecting
those quite feasibly likely to be a scumbag.

GildasTheMonk
May 6, 2013 at 18:22

A shocking story, Roy