Solicitors win best-value tendering battle but fears remain over pilots

Solicitors claimed to have ‘won a battle’ with the Legal Services Commission this week, as it announced it is to delay the ­rollout of best value tendering across the country by three years.

However, lawyers voiced concerns that the LSC still plans to pilot the scheme in Greater Manchester and Avon and Somerset this autumn – warning that the pilots could lead to ­‘personal bankruptcy’ for firms that decide to take part. The two pilots of the BVT scheme, in which firms will bid against each other in an online auction to secure contracts for criminal defence work in police stations and magistrates’ courts, will take place in October.

There will then be a 12-18 month evaluation of the impact on suppliers in the pilot areas before a decision is made to extend the scheme nationally. The amended schedule will see the national rollout put back to 2013 at the earliest.

The LSC has also modified some of its proposals in light of concerns raised during the consultation process. Firms will be able to bid for higher volumes of work and conduct some ‘own client’ work where cases fall outside the area in which they have a contract.

Law Society president Paul Marsh said he was pleased the LSC had taken on board a number of the Society’s concerns, but added that it was ‘a shame the scheme had not been dropped altogether’.

He warned of the ‘potentially destructive impact’ on firms in the pilot areas that will be forced to exit the market if they did not secure a contract.

‘For some lawyers in this position, the result will be personal bankruptcy,’ said Marsh. ‘It is not acceptable that people should be bankrupted by the operation of a pilot scheme.’

Leading criminal law solicitor Andrew Keogh, founding partner of Wigan firm Keogh, predicted the demise of BVT: ‘The pilots won’t happen. It’s a monumental shift by the LSC, kicking everything into the long grass.’

Franklin Sinclair, senior partner at Manchester firm Tuckers, said practitioners would be looking at ways to challenge the decision to proceed, but if the pilots went ahead, it would be a ‘disaster for clients’.

‘I can foresee firms making unsustainable suicide bids and the price ending up so low that providing a service of any quality will not be possible,’ he said.

Ian Kelcey, chairman of the Law Society’s criminal law committee, warned: ‘Each firm [in the pilot] will have to consider what decision it makes in relation to BVT. But they should be under no misapprehension that, if the price drops, the standards required by the SRA will not decrease.’

Joy Merriam, chairwoman of the Criminal Lawyers Solicitors Association, said the concept of competitive tendering was unsuitable for the provision of criminal defence services. ‘It’s nice to have won the battle, but the war isn’t over,’ she said. ‘We’ll still fight, with our colleagues in the pilot areas.’

LSC chief executive Carolyn Regan said: ‘While we recognise that solicitors say they do not want BVT, we believe it is the right way forward to pilot these proposals and evaluate their impact.’