A top criminal lawyer who helped set up the CDS Direct helpline for detainees has launched an outspoken attack on the Legal Services Commission, which engaged him as a key adviser.
Writing in this week’s Gazette, Michael Burdett accuses the LSC of being ‘arrogant and devious’ in its attitude to the reforms of criminal and civil legal aid, ‘which have destroyed totally the goodwill of practitioners towards it.’
He also accuses the commission of making misleading claims about how much money the scheme has saved, and claims ministers are ‘intent on circumscribing the rights of suspects and defendants’.
Burdett, who says we are moving towards a ‘totalitarian society’, alleges that the Ministry of Justice has proposed in private that the right to legal advice in police stations be withdrawn altogether.
Burdett was invited by the LSC to become its resident supervising solicitor when the CDS Direct pilot was set up in 2005. Now semi-retired, he is a past-president of both the South London Law Society and the London Criminal Courts Solicitors Association, and founder committee member of the Criminal Law Solicitors Association.
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