Busy solicitors usually have little time for government green papers.

After all, only the legislation really counts.

Legal aid practitioners should not make this mistake with Lord Mackay's latest offering.

Get a copy and read it.Assessing this document's significance, however, requires more than reading the words on its pages.

Its proposals need to be evaluated against your political judgment.

For instance, do you believe that the annual allocation for criminal legal aid would be set after cautious consideration of all relevant factors, anticipating 'the effects of legislative and other policy changes'? Do you believe that such changes would be construed to include, as suggested by the green paper, changing police clear-up rates and cautioning policies, the success of the CPS, and legislative changes such as that to the right of silence? Or do you believe that this fixed budget, like so many others, will simply be fixed at last year's figure plus or minus a percentage?The issue of credibility lies at the heart of any assessment of this green paper.

The Lord Chancellor betrayed uncharacteristic irritability at the suggestion that his motivation was financial both at his promotional press conference and in media interviews.

The departmental line is that this is not a savings exercise.

In furtherance of this, no mention is made of the government's overall desire to reduce expenditure until p.112.

Yet, we all know that the green paper stems directly from the fundamental review established by Michael Portillo, as chief secretary to the treasury, precisely to achieve savings.

Every cabinet minister other than the astute Michael Heseltine has been saddled, as intended, by the consequences.Denial of such an evident motivation hinders the Lord Chancellor's case.

As ever, frankness would have been a better policy.

The silence fools nobody and taints the government's argument.

This is the more regrettable because, in some ways, the paper accepts many of the arguments against the status quo in legal aid advanced by critics such as the Legal Action Group over the last 20 years.As the paper argues, legal aid is too directed to traditional lawyers' work and too little towards whole areas like housing, immigration, employment and debt.

Legal aid should be seen as only one component in publicly funded legal services.The government should explicitly accept a commitment 'to improve access to justice', as the paper states in its first paragraph.

Lord Mackay should accept, as he does, that eligibility must not fall further.

More use can be made of the advice sector, particularly where lawyers work with paralegal advisers.The difficulties lie concealed in the detail.

The essential argument of the green paper is that money can be shifted into new areas of social welfare law by deploying the voluntary sector at a cheaper rate than existing lawyers, and by cutting their remuneration in legal aid's traditional heartlands.

The mechanism for savings will be block contracts allocated from fixed allocations of funds by the area managers of the Legal Aid Board on the basis of competitive tendering.

Board officials will have enormous powers over the firms within their fiefdoms.

For this purpose at least, the government has departed from bureaucracy-bashing.

Curiously, the underlying model of the legal services market deployed in the green paper resembles nothing so much as a Soviet command economy.Under these proposals, the board giveth and the board taketh away.

It will have wide discretion with which to make its decisions .

You will compete on price but also 'on quality and other criteria'.

The latter appear to include the intention to have a range of different sorts of providers and the government 'sees no reason why smaller organisations and sole practitioners should not be able to obtain contracts'.

Yet, it is difficult to see that competition on anything other than price would be feasible or, indeed, survive judicial scrutiny.What is to be done? The response has surely to be twofold.

The negative, the attack on capping, is straightforward: capping will lead to irrational rationing of client eligibility as it does everywhere else.

The arguments against it are clear.

More difficult is the positive.

The government's disclosed objective of increasing the quality and range of services is worthy.

Lawyers may have to engage more than before in how these aims could be achieved.Legal aid practitioners must become frighteningly efficient to cope with the reduction on remuneration that now looks unavoidable.

Labour Party spokespeople offer no hope of respite.

Some contingency thinking is required.

The profession may have to admit that, in many areas, firms of a certain size and specialism hold advantages in both cost and quality; that quality really is an issue that requires lawyers to distinguish themselves, as professionals, from the government, the board and, quite frankly, their own past performance by accepting that legal aid clients are entitled to service at levels of best practice; that an extension of fixed fees per case is perhaps an evil preferable to block contracts that give too much power to bureaucrats, too little competitive incentive to solicitors and too little choice to clients; that lawyers should be encouraged to work within the voluntary sector to provide a resource for advisers who might otherwise find some legal cases impossible to identify and then to handle them; that more attention is required for clients with social welfare law problems.Such a far-sighted approach to its members' self-interest may be difficult for the Law Society to stomach, particularly at this time of backwoods revolt.

Both practitioners and clients are likely, however, to find the alternatives much worse.

This paper needs an open and well-informed debate.

Get that order in now.