A cataclysm lies ahead for the family law justice system in this country. I may be so bold as to describe it as an apocalypse of destruction.


The beginning of the end will arrive in October 2007, when the first tidal waves of standard fees for family law legal aid cases will commence. These standard fees will undermine the cornerstone of one of the principal pillars of the welfare state since its inception in 1948. It will never recover.



The proposals will work beautifully from the perspective of the Legal Services Commission (LSC) and we can then all survey with 'admiration' its skill in seeing the current wreckage of a dying legal aid system finally shot down in flames, never again to see resurrection.



We will be a democracy and a Western civilization left without access to justice for our most vulnerable citizens. I fail to see any justice for parents and children in this ministry of the LSC.



Is the UK doomed to remain forever at the bottom of the UNICEF table for the welfare of children in the EU? Does no one in our Ministry of Justice care about children and what happens to them?



I write as a solicitor who has been committed to family law legal aid work since her admission to the roll in 1990. I know at first hand the economic and commercial reality of the practice of law balanced against the passion of those of us who seek to uphold justice and human rights in the family courts.



Our work is to help families during the most difficult and heart-breaking times of their lives. The simple truth is that legal aid work is a vocation but, unlike the medical and teaching professions, we are not valued enough to gain protection.



Justice and the welfare of children are not important enough to save. That is the message of the LSC in these proposals.



While the LSC writes glibly of choice, quality and efficiency, it is more instructive to look at the reality rather than the rhetoric and spin.



I recognise that there are still some who may have some misapprehension that legal aid lawyers are profligate consumers of taxpayers' money. It is a silken deception of lies so convenient to the LSC, which cares for nothing, save for its own budget reductions, and which cannot hide its woeful failure at failing to win budgetary increases from the Treasury.



If these proposals for standard fees in legal aid come to fruition in October 2007, we shall all observe in shameful silence as month by month notice of termination of family law legal aid are delivered to the LSC.



Even novices of spin in kindergarten have heard of 'the exit strategy'.



Andrea Boulter, president, Surrey Law Society, Guildford