Ministers'platitudes

I am intrigued by Neil Jopson's letter and would love to know why Mr P, a sole practitioner owning his own office property, bothered to be a solicitor for a return of 5% on turnover (see [2003] Gazette, 3 July, 18).

As a sole practitioner myself, I thought that one attraction of sole practice is that you get to keep (but pay tax on) about 90% of what you earn.

Mr P might have done better to have turned his offices into a cake shop.

It is ironic that your lead letter in the same issue was a collection of government platitudes about maintaining 'a well-qualified group of legal aid lawyers'.

It is only because solicitors like Mr P keep up the struggle that there is any legal presence at all on the high street.

It is not just legal aid (and its bureaucracy) which is closing down much of the legal profession, but ruthless price- cutting resulting from opening the profession to commercial pressures a generation ago.

The City types can be left to their own devices.

Some of us sole practitioners too can look after ourselves either by low overheads or by specialism (I do only pensions law), but if there is to be a future for general practice with a network of legal advisers accessible to the public in all areas, it is not enough to rely on legal aid.

The alternative might be a salaried national legal service, and there may also be a place for re-inventing fixed fees for some types of non-contentious work.

Roderick Ramage, Coppenhall, Stafford