I am not an employed lawyer, nor have I ever been so in the 24 years since I qualified.

I am a lawyer who believes in fair play and equal opportunity for all and so I read with great sadness the result of the vote forced by Lord Ackner in the debate on the Access to Justice Bill in the House of Lords (see [1999] Gazette, 3 February, 5).The implication of that division vote was that 'employed lawyers, in the CPS and elsewhere, were inherently partisan and that their independence as advocates could not be relied upon'.

The Lord Chancellor has rightly refused to accept that vote.Why is it that the clear purpose of the Courts and Legal Services Act 1990 has been so difficult to achieve? The answer is simple: an effective rearguard action by the Bar, supported by some elements of the judiciary, in attempting to preserve the Bar's higher court monopoly.

Some passages from a recent House of Lords debate will illustrate that even after all this time there are still those who, for a variety of reasons, wish to preserve the Bar's monopoly.Between them, Lord Ackner and Lord Hutchinson were able to p ersuade their Lordships that employed lawyers could not be relied on to exercise proper ethical control of their cases in the higher courts.

There were citations of old anecdotal experiences of the horrors of dealing with some Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) lawyers and how they would bring down standards in the higher courts.However, let me examine the real world of today.

The vast majority of criminal cases, 97%, are dealt with in the magistrates' court.

They are almost exclusively prosecuted by CPS lawyers who make tough decisions about cases every day.

Nowhere in the debate did I detect any criticism of that situation.But what a dreadful transformation, in their Lordships' eyes, will a CPS lawyer undergo if let loose in the higher courts.

Might it be that in donning his tabs and gown he feels so inferior in not wearing a wig that he decides to abandon his previous years of ethical behaviour and starts to lie and deceive the court? I give an obviously insulting reason but are any of their Lordships' reasons any less insulting to employed lawyers?There are vast numbers of 'either way cases' in the criminal law, and there is often a fine dividing line as to which court will deal with such cases, indeed they make up a large percentage of crown court business.

Are we to say that one case above the line is inherently corrupt if a CPS lawyer prosecutes it in the crown court but perfectly acceptable if that lawyer does so in the magistrates' court.The CPS was created to be a buffer between the police and the courts, to give robust sensible advice on evidence and by and large I believe it does that.

There are cases where counsel and the CPS lawyers may disagree in the crown court and that may be through inexperience of crown court matters on the part of the CPS lawyer who thus far has been condemned to a lifetime in the magistrates' court.

So much the better then that CPS lawyers should have the opportunity to learn the ways of the crown court.I am not sure how some of their Lordships imagine the introduction of CPS lawyers would happen.

Some of them seem to think that overnight CPS lawyers would be conducting murder trials at the Old Bailey.

For all I know there may be lurking amongst the ranks of the CPS some latent Marshall Hall, who at the drop of a hat could sally forth and lead for the Crown at the Bailey tomorrow.

That lawyer would likely be the exception.

The vast majority will do as I did when I first acquired higher rights of audience in 1994: start modestly and build up experience.

They will learn from those around them.

I admire the forensic skills of good advocates and the integrity of the Bar and I believe I am accepted as an equal if not yet in forensic skill then in integrity.

In a fair world, I would like to think they would feel the same way about me even if I was a CPS lawyer.