Sometime, somewhere, a government will respond to the scandal, revealed in an outraged press, that many poor people are no longer eligible for legal aid.

Ministers will be so galvanised that they will demand immediate action, overriding an ongoing 'fundamental review' and the imminent publication of a consequent green paper.

In the meantime, we have the mirror opposite.The Lord Chancellor's Department's consultation paper on legal aid for the apparently wealthy is the gover nment's response to a campaign, largely conducted by a fearless Sunday Times but echoed elsewhere in the media, against the grant of legal aid to a number of seemingly rich businessmen.

Most were accused of serious fraud.

Roger Levitt, famously photographed toasting his sentence of community service with champagne, is alleged to have run up a £3.7m bill in his defence.Former financier Peter Clowes, required with his wife to repay £6m to the Department of Trade and Industry, may have cost little less.

The defence of Ernest Saunders was probably in the same bracket, as was Jawad Hashim's defence of the £34m civil claim brought against him by the Arab Monetary Fund, of which he was the one-time president.

All continue to live in a style unusual for the recipients of such large amounts of state aid.The Lord Chancellor's paper gives, however, every appearance of a somewhat ritualistic approach to the problem.

It begins, for instance, with no examination of what the facts were behind these cases.

Admittedly, statements of individual circumstances would have been inappropriate: some form of general analysis should surely have been unavoidable.

Without it, the paper lacks any coherent direction and ends up rounding up an ill-assorted collection of relatively minor anti-avoidance measures laced with fundamental restructuring of the whole legal aid scheme.

Hence, it invites comment both on a relatively straightforward suggestion for setting legal aid costs of undisclosed assets and, much more fundamentally, whether civil legal aid should be turned into a litigation loan.A number of reasons might explain departmental lack of zeal.

Almost all the publicised cases related to criminal cases.

As the paper itself acknowledges, a defendant's lack of legal aid can penalise the court as much as the defendant.

Serious fraud trials are difficult enough with lawyers.

As Lord Spens showed, an unrepresented defendant only adds to the havoc and confusion.

To counter this, the Lord Chancellor's Department has already consulted on the idea that in serious fraud trials representation might be thrust, willy nilly, at the defendant through the appointment of an amicus curiae.

Paradoxically, the Crown may have as great an interest in the grant of legal aid to the defence as the defendant.

Eligibility rules simply cannot, therefore, be too Draconian.Those accused of serious fraud are, usually, nothing if not adept at the arrangement of their financial affairs.

Their cases often turn on whether their conduct has been sufficiently adept to escape the dictates of the criminal law.

We know nothing of the tax arrangements of those who have triggered the current witchhunt but it seems a reasonable hypothesis that there was nothing in their returns to the Inland Revenue inconsistent with their disclosures to the Legal Aid Board.

In such circumstances, eligibility for legal aid raises wider implications which the Lord Chancellor's Department might understandably hesitate to pursue.Governmental prejudice leads to silence in the consultation paper on other issues.

An obvious way in which the apparently rich but actually unscrupulous may obtain legal aid is by lying about their resources.

An evident remedy would be to allocate more staff to the checking of financial information given by applicants.

Currently, this is undertaken as little more than routine.

Additional resources for this work might not, in the end, be cost-effective.

Such greater staff intensiveness would, however, certainly be against government policy.

This is, therefore, another issue left uncons idered.The rambling construction of passages in the paper further indicates its hasty and reluctant composition.

This reaches its nadir in the discussion of whether assets which are the subject of dispute should be regarded as owned by an applicant for legal aid: 'If legal aid were not granted, disputed resources would only be protected if there were a court injunction freezing them.

It is difficult to see why the legal aid regulations should operate to preserve disputed assets in a situation where they would not be preserved if legal aid were not granted.

On the other hand, the person claiming the asset might be seriously prejudiced if he wins and the asset is subject to a claim by the Legal Aid Board for his unsuccessful opponent's costs.' It would be outrageous if you proved to a court's satisfaction that you owned a house but the state could demand a share of its value to fund the rejected challenge of a rival claimant.A further indication of lack of rigour is the failure to look at any other experience in dealing with the same problem.

Any means-tested benefit provides opportunities for abuse.

The regulations in relation to income support contain copious provisions dealing with 'notional resources'.

These provide a happy hunting ground for ideas, including, for instance, ways of calculating notional shares in discretionary trusts under which the applicant is a beneficiary and a method of calculating notional earnings if in apparently unpaid employment.

Nevertheless, they merit not a single word.Let us hope that the appearance of this paper is not deceptive.

It looks like a lightweight potboiler designed to get the media off Lord Mackay's back.

As such, it was misguided.

Ministers should have resisted the temptation to respond when they are on the point of agreeing a comprehensive review of legal aid.

In any event, as legal aid practitioners know above all, the current scandal in relation to civil legal aid is not the eligibility of the apparently rich: it is the ineligibility of the manifestly poor.