This has hardly been a vintage session for the dignity of parliament, with politicians of all major parties bundled into the stocks for claiming expenses for duck houses and the like. However, the Public Accounts Committee’s damning report on legal aid procurement does at least suggest that our elected representatives are capable of redemption.

In highlighting the incompetent performance of the Legal Services Commission, MPs have performed a valuable public service and substantiated what solicitors have been saying for months.

One paragraph has particular resonance for providers. As a monopoly purchaser, the LSC has to know it is paying the right price for legal aid and the effects its policies are having on the sustainability of providers. Yet the commission ‘does not know enough about the costs and profitability of firms to know if it has set its fees at an appropriate level’. No wonder leading practitioners such as Rodney Warren, director of the Criminal Law Solicitors Association, have suggested the commission should simply be scrapped.

We began by alluding to the questionable use of public money and we will end similarly. Accounts for the last two years show that LSC executive directors took home thousands of pounds in bonuses on top of their six-figure salaries. Why? There have been no such bonuses for embattled solicitors who have kept alive the principle of access to justice amid the chaos.