The Law Society has called on the Legal Services Commission to suspend the implementation of the family legal aid tender round in a letter to its chief executive Carolyn Downs.

Law Society chief executive Desmond Hudson said ‘the public interest demands’ that the tender round should be suspended ‘pending an urgent but thorough public evaluation of the result to ensure proper access to justice’.

Hudson said the outcome of the tender, which will see a 46% reduction in the number of firms doing family legal aid work, will be ‘deeply damaging’ to access to justice, particularly in rural areas. He cited East Cornwall, Wales, Northumberland and Lincolnshire as areas where there are serious concerns over the small number of firms awarded contracts.

Hudson said the tender outcome meant ‘over 1,100 firms will have to make significant changes to their business model with less than three months’ notice’. He said ‘other industries facing such a shakeup [by] government would have had significant notice and proper compensation for the firms affected’.

The Law Society chief executive added that it was ‘quite wrong’ to assume that existing clients will be unaffected, as some firms are likely to close down and others will lose experienced staff, whom they will be unable to replace.

He said the impact of the tender would be ‘hugely damaging to the fabric of the family justice system’, and it was ‘unacceptable’ to implement it in just over nine weeks.

Hudson said that while suspending the implementation would cause ‘some disruption’, this would be ‘far preferable to the major disruption’ caused by going ahead without a review.

In an interview with the Gazette last week, LSC chief executive Carolyn Downs said the 46% reduction in the number of firms awarded contracts had not been intended by the commission, but resulted from the additional quality criteria that solicitors had asked it to include. Downs also suggested that she had been surprised by the ‘aggressive’ attitudes she had encountered, and said providers needed to engage more constructively with the LSC.

In a separate letter to Downs last week, Kent solicitor Robin Murray suggested that the angry response she had received from solicitors stemmed from the LSC’s failure to take into account the profession’s views in the past. He gave best value tendering as an example, pointing out that solicitors made 600 responses to the LSC’s consultation, with the vast majority of these opposing the introduction of BVT, but this still failed to influence the LSC’s policy.

Click here for the full interview with Carolyn Downs.