It is great that legal aid minister Lord Hunt operates an open door as far as legal aid solicitors are concerned (see [2007] Gazette, 8 November, 20). It is a shame, therefore, that only one of my two letters to him received a reply and even that was a 'cut and paste' job, recycling carefully prepared points without actually addressing my concerns.


It seems that solicitors who are publicly funded and their clients are to suffer because the Legal Services Commission (LSC) is not able to show the Treasury that it has tight control of the legal aid budget. Never mind addressing those issues that have actually caused the budget to increase - instead, the Ministry of Justice/LSC wishes to create some kind of false fixed-fee market before introducing best-value tendering in the hope that this will control the legal aid budget. This is clearly madness.



If they could be bothered to talk to solicitors about the real problems, so that together we can create real solutions, then there might be hope for legal aid. Unfortunately, they are only interested in talking to solicitors about their solutions to the problems they have identified.



One immediate worthwhile policy the Ministry of Justice might wish to adopt is the closure of the LSC and the transfer of its various tasks to the Courts Service - that would save millions of pounds - and allow the Solicitors Regulation Authority to decide if peer review in a fixed-fee environment is actually of any use or is the equivalent of the naked Emperor parading through the streets.



Michael Robinson, Emmersons, Sunderland