Before In the Loop there was Yes Minister, the latter contrasting with the former in airing only the mildest of profanities. One sprang to mind when considering the family legal aid tender. ‘Minister, if you must do this damn silly thing,’ the mandarin Sir Humphrey Appleby advises the hapless Jim Hacker, ‘don't do it in this damn silly way’.

To speak of perverse outcomes barely does justice (sic) to the consequences of this exercise. Experienced and well-respected firms have been cast aside for no seemingly good reason, devastating the supplier base. The Legal Services Commission’s lame response is that a provider cull was not the intended outcome – how nice to know – and that the situation may be partly remedied through appeals.

But how can it redistribute allocations it has already made without implicitly admitting that the entire process is devoid of legitimacy? A tender process is just that; bidders either met the criteria or they didn’t. And if the criteria were wrong to start with, then the whole exercise has been a sham.

Providing access to justice for some of the most vulnerable people in society cannot be achieved by roughly the same means as finding someone to run the local sports centre cafe. The Law Society’s formal challenge will complicate matters further in the short term, but it’s hard to see that Chancery Lane had any choice but to act as it did.