As Obiter waits with bated breath to read Sir Ian Magee’s report on the Legal Services Commission (incidentally, there’s no word yet on when it might be published, even though the anticipated January delivery date has been and gone), there was even more bad news from the beleaguered quango last week. The LSC had to put out a notice informing lawyers that it had made something of a dog’s breakfast of the criminal e-tendering process, for which criminal solicitors are currently busy submitting tenders in between responding to consultations and representing the odd client. In what has become an all-too-familiar scenario as far as the LSC is concerned, the commission announced that it had experienced some ‘technical issues’ with certain parts of the tender form that prevented applicants from being able to fill it in. Oops. There were also difficulties with the geographically challenged ‘postcode eligibility tool’, which was incorrectly assigning postcode areas to schemes. After replacing the original version with version 2 and asking all those who had already submitted tenders to resubmit them, the LSC then had to replace that with a third version after further errors were found. Red faces all round, then. The LSC issued no apology, but said the issues have now been resolved – so that’s reassuring. This display of ineptitude prompted Mr Crimeline, aka criminal solicitor Andrew Keogh, to wail: ‘Please, someone put this organisation out of its misery.’

Sir Ian, over to you.