Rate for the job

Brandon Lewis’s evanescent stint as lord chancellor ‘refreshed’ the criminal bar. He handed criminal barristers £54m to halt their strike. 

Then Dominic Raab was reinstalled at Petty France, extinguishing faint hopes that solicitors would be granted parity of funding. Raab told MPs an ‘unsustainable’ pay rise would stoke inflation.

This argument is fallacious. All an increase would do is partially compensate solicitors for the declining purchasing power of fees that have been inflating away for years. Even the 11% rise conceded post-Bellamy amounted to another real-terms cut.

The latest RPI inflation forecast for 2023, by the way, is 10.7%. No need to fear a run on Prada handbags by criminal defenders.

For a politician ideologically bewitched by the invisible hand of the market, moreover, Raab’s intransigence is doubly perverse. You can cynically exploit the goodwill of public-spirited professionals for so long, but eventually vocation will be trumped by financial necessity. There’s a reason only 4% of duty solicitors are under 35. It’s the same reason the NHS has 50,000 nursing vacancies.

It is odd, too, that the bar seems to be shielded from the inflation bogeyman. This week we heard there is to be a 15% uplift for prosecutors to restore parity with defence fees. The Law Society’s anger at solicitors again being ‘short-changed’ is palpable.

As with the nurses, it’s difficult to identify an ‘end game’ here. One assumes Raab and his Cabinet colleagues at least concede that criminal defendants should be granted legal representation.

If all else fails, what about an expanded Public Defender Service?

Well – that would mean nationalising the sector, hardly a go-to policy option for Conservatives. And it probably wouldn’t be cheaper than giving solicitors a rise anyway.

A bigger PDS didn’t come within his remit, but Bellamy made clear his own opposition, stressing that we do not want the state representing both sides of a case.

As Bellamy said, the present system is not ‘fundamentally defective’. Could it be that, like nurses, solicitors just need to be paid more? Market forces apply to labour too.