SRA defends trainee minimum salary cut
Scrapping the trainee minimum salary will increase, rather than hinder, diversity in the profession, a senior regulator has insisted.
Samantha Barrass, executive director of the Solicitors Regulation Authority, was speaking after SRA board members voted to deregulate the minimum salary at their meeting last week. Following the decision, firms will be able to pay their trainees the statutory national minimum wage of £6.08 an hour from August 2014. The Junior Lawyers Division (JLD) described the decision as ‘nonsensical’.
However, Barrass told the Westminster Legal Policy Forum there was evidence to suggest that removal of the minimum salary requirement might result in more training contracts ‘which could provide opportunities for those same groups who might be potentially disadvantaged’.
She added: ‘Professions which have diversified routes to qualification have a more diverse workforce and, in particular, better representation of those from lower socio-economic backgrounds.’
Critics pointed out that not a single firm has publicly stated it will offer more training contracts upon deregulation. The SRA was not able to provide an analysis of the results of its four-month consultation on the issue when the Gazette went to press on Tuesday.
In today’s issue, JLD chair Hekim Hannan accuses the regulator of selectivity in its response to the consultation. ‘Any shred of support for abolition was seized upon, no matter how weak, while the JLD’s 90-page response barely merited a mention,’ he said.
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Comments
If there are any increases in
If there are any increases in number of training contracts, they will be with small/medium firms who don't pay fees for the GDL/LPC and will paying the national minimum wage of £6.08 and hour, £11,065 a year, with a monthly take-home of £838.00.
Given loan repayments, credit cards and overdrafts, those from lower socio-economic groups will be unable to take these positions due to their personal financial position. Those from wealthier backgrounds do not have this issue.
Any increase in training contracts due to the abolishion of the minimum salary will therefore have a negative effect of diversity and decrease social mobility.
Absolutely spot on.
Absolutely spot on.
what's sauce for the goose
perhaps we could have a pay review for ALL members of the SRA board and LawSociety exec regulators etc.
There appears to be a certain amount of kudos which attaches to roles of this kind.
Bearing the benefit this accrues to our "betters" in relation to further gravy-train jobs, perhaps we could have a rule whereby their wages are capped to , say, 25% less than the average wage throughout the profession.
let's see if they still want to do the job then.
Diversity is red smoke screen
The real reason for cutting the salary is the down grading of the legal profession. If the plan goes ahead as intended there will only be a couple of lawyers managing an army of paralegals (any adult who can use a computer) working for peanuts. Do you really think the sons and daughters of the higher classes are going to be working in the law much longer? The new parafemale will be predominately from the lower middle and upper working classes.
The higher classes move where the money is - banking and in a more modest sense, parts of the public sector where year on year pay "rises" happen, there is job security and a respectable pension for all.
Big business will make a killing out of the new legal trade and get out when the legal system collapses.
The consumer rights commissars will not be on the yachts in Monte Carlo though!
Training contracts may be
Training contracts may be increased as a result from the removal of the minimum salary but this will mean that at the end of the training contract more people will be out of a job, in already competitive market, as firms will not be able to make the differences in wages from £6 per hour to newly qualified. So many people are already facing difficulty of finding a newly qualified job, can you imagine it if there were dozens more applicants?
As regards the socio-economic factor....well, well....its all fruitless talk given as the coalition government has decided not to enact section 1 of the equality act 2010, addressing socio-economic disadvantage.
Equality
Don't you understand that the opening of the floodgates with the introduction of the LPC and the widening of the suppliers of the same has not opened up the legal profession to all but has ruined the job security and career prospects of all. The ludicrous political correctness coupled with the stupid faith in the market exhibited by New Labour has destroyed us all. It is fatuous to blame the coalition for this. New Labour us squarely to blame. They encouraged claims managers, they created ABSs, they failed to control the proliferation of LPC providers and they took away our legislative independence. They have behaved to us in the same way that the Conservatives under Margaret Thatcher behaved towards the miners. Mrs Thatcher had to fight the miners. New Labour could rely upon their many allies within the Law Society to smooth the path to destruction.Yes there will be equality in the end. The equality of the graveyard.
SRA defends trainee minimum salary cut
There is one way to increase diversity (sex, race, disability and class) and that is to put up the pass mark and lower the pass rate for students as used to be the case pre 1994.Then firms were forced to ignore such as passing was a one way ticket...
It won't happen.
Craplin et all pass all their students...
Thus we have 'professional' exams that are open to all (in effect all can pass including the very dim from public school and Pox-bridge)...
Reality Check
I can't see why this decision is coming as a surprise.
At the small end of the market, £5,000 a year makes a lot of difference. The difference being whether you can offer that job or not. So, your view on this presumably comes down to whether you want a better chance of getting a training contract, and are willing to accept less, or whether you are happy to have a lower chance of getting the contract and expect to be paid more.
My bet is that those who really want to be lawyers, who understand that it is a career, not a job, with long term benefits if not short term, will fall into the former category.
I have had potential trainees offer to work for free, given the scarcity of contracts. I had to explain though that we couldn't do that, and we couldn't even pay minimum wage. I'm not sure I'm well enough placed to deal with the additional administrative and regulatory burdens of taking on a trainee anyway, but at £11,000 it might just be feasible.
I don't understand Zheni's point - if a firm can't afford a NQ salary they can't afford it, whatever they were paying the trainee in the first place. In fact, you might argue that *if* that extra £5,000 a year is saved and reinvested in the firm, that might actually give the firm a slight advantage in terms of paying a higher salary later. That's merely a question of money management.
We cannot pretend, as lawyers, to be operating in an economic vacuum. The reality isn't pleasant, but it is the reality nonetheless.
No, it isn't a career, it's a
No, it isn't a career, it's a job-and has been for a long time.
There is no "long term
There is no "long term benefit" - lots of lower paid trainees means lots of lower paid future solicitors, all with massive debt, unless they come from a well off family.
There's no point having lots
There's no point having lots of tc's available if I can't afford to takeone of them
Ican't even afford a lap top
Ican't even afford a lap top with a space bar that works!