Incoming Bar Council chairman Peter Lodder QC today warned publicly funded barristers to diversify or face a bleak future.

Legal aid rate cuts have been ‘too numerous and too deep’ for young barristers to survive on that single source of income, he told Bar Council members in his inaugural address to the body.

The recent round of proposed cuts, while ‘brutal’, are merely ‘the latest in a series of progressively deeper acts of surgery that commenced many years ago’, he added.

'I want to reassure able and hard-working members of the bar, whose practices are threatened by the latest proposals, that they continue to have a realistic future,’ Lodder said.

‘The message is not that barristers must leave publicly funded work, but that in order to sustain that type of practice, they will almost certainly need to develop a mixed practice, incorporating privately as well as publicly funded work.’

Lodder also voiced strong support for the controversial, judicially assessed Quality Assurance for Advocates scheme. The Solicitors Association of Higher Court Advocates has expressed concern about the ‘over-reliance’ on judicial evaluation, pointing out that judges have historically demonstrated a bias towards the bar.

Lodder said: ‘Some – barristers as well as other advocates – have expressed concern about this proposal. But I consider that this is the best way forward – judges are the consumers of advocacy. They can perform this task alongside their existing duties. The cost to the cash-strapped practitioner will be significantly lower than for peer review or role-play and integrity can be enhanced by an effective appeal structure.’