The feature ‘Dial J for Justice’ (see [2009] Gazette, 5 February, 10) demonstrates how the Legal Services Commission is collaborating with the government to reduce substantially, if not extinguish, access to justice through legal aid. My own experience is apt.

Some years ago, Tony Blair said that the criminal justice system should be rebalanced in favour of victims. I agree, but the disproportionate way in which this is being carried out, ostensibly in the name of economy, illustrates the extent to which we are moving towards a totalitarian society. I have it on impeccable authority that, last year, the Ministry of Justice proposed, privately, that the right to legal advice in the police station be withdrawn.

When the pilot project for CDS Direct was set up in 2005, I was invited by the LSC to become its resident supervising solicitor.

I accepted, for three reasons: after 30 years’ involvement in court and police station duty solicitor schemes, I wanted to ensure that this experiment was run to a high professional standard; I believed that CDS Direct could deliver better quality telephone advice on duty calls than private practice for £30 per case, and practitioners would not regret the passing of this work, especially at night; and the relationship between the LSC and legal aid practitioners seemed to be improving, primarily through the preferred supplier pilot in which my firm was participating.

I worked on the CDS Direct pilot for nine months until my 65th birthday. The project was deemed a success. Then along came Lord Carter with his recommendation, which for a market-based service is utterly illogical, to expand CDS Direct to include all own-solicitor work.

I warned that expansion would reduce the quality of police station advice and be unacceptable to the profession. I was told that leading counsel had advised that the LSC was not required by legislation to provide a hybrid police station service. I would like to see that opinion.

In your feature, the LSC justifies the expansion of CDS Direct and the Defence Solicitor Call Centre on grounds of savings to the taxpayer. I think it is being economical with the truth. John Sirodcar states overall savings are £8m. In its own evaluation report on CDS Direct in 2006, the LSC identified ongoing savings of nearly £5m. In its consultation paper on CDS expansion, the figure was put at £3.9m.

I have asked the chief executives of the LSC and the Criminal Defence Service for a breakdown of how these savings are calculated. I have received no reply. I can only draw adverse inferences from silence.

It is certainly not true that £7m in savings ‘came from lawyers who used to have to go to a station and now don’t’. Suppliers are contractually forbidden to attend a station on a telephone advice-only case. If the LSC has evidence suppliers are breaking their contracts to the tune of £7m, it should provide it.

I agree with Ed Cape and Lee Bridges that the expanded CDS Direct is of questionable legality, but I also agree with Tony Edwards that the profession has more important fish to fry than CDS Direct. My concern is that the hypocritical and bureaucratic attitude shown by the LSC in this area is being replicated in other areas. Post-Carter, it is the LSC’s arrogant and devious approach towards the reforms of criminal and civil legal aid which has destroyed totally the burgeoning goodwill of practitioners towards it that I detected in 2005.

My fear is that the LSC is meekly obeying the dictates of the MoJ and ministers who are intent on circumscribing the rights of suspects and defendants, at a time when the police and the state are being given unprecedented powers over the citizen.

Blair’s exercise in rebalance has become unbalanced. And, of course, we are told that it is all being done in the interests of the taxpayer, that is, until the taxpayer has problems with the police.

Michael Burdett is a consultant to HCL Hanne & Co in London. He is a past-president of the London Criminal Courts Solicitors Association, and founder committee member of the Criminal Law Solicitors Association