In your editorial, you rightly say that this is 'crunch time for the Bill', referring to the Legal Services Bill, which has gone to the Commons after detailed scrutiny and amendment by the Lords (see [2007] Gazette, 24 May, 12).


Elsewhere in the same issue, you report the relevant minister, Bridget Prentice MP, as indicating to the Institute of Legal Executives that the government would not brook a delay in introducing alternative business structures (ABSs).



That is an all too familiar governmental response to Lords' amendments. However, there is no electoral mandate for such a strategic change; there has been inadequate consultation on the access-to-justice impact of ABSs, and indeed on their impact on the independence of our profession.



In the course of debates in the Lords, the weight of advocacy, including that of senior judges, was overwhelmingly antipathetic to ABSs in relation to the justice effects.



As the triple alliance of the Sole Practitioners Group, Legal Aid Practitioners Group and Legal Action Group has emphasised, the idea that the new, externally-owned commercial entities will compete for low-paid, sometimes loss-making, work which is nonetheless of vital importance to the citizens involved, is cloud cuckoo land. So is the refusal to see that those high street firms which, to their great credit, still service the legal needs of the whole community, will be unable to do so in future if some of their current profitable lines of business are partly captured by local supermarkets, for example, which will in any event not scruple to loss-lead.



May I urge all members of the profession who are committed to the much-pressured ideal of real equality before the law to write to their local MPs (and copy to Gordon Brown).



Andrew Phillips (Lord Phillips of Sudbury), Bates Wells & Braithwaite, London