In response to a letter from my MP concerning the proposed legal aid cuts, I received a reply from justice minister Jonathan Djanogly.

This stated: ‘The government wants to discourage people from resorting to lawyers whenever they face a problem...’

This is, one might think, a naked attempt by central government to prevent the public from engaging the services of skilled professional people to assist them and, thereby, reduce the compensation debt burden on several organs of the state.

It may be just a coincidence, but in December 2010 the Criminal Injuries Compensation Authority (CICA) announced that it would not, in future, make any payments directly to solicitors but would, for some obscure reason which I do not fully understand, only make payments to claimants.

In practice, this will mean that solicitors handling CICA claims will not receive any money for their services.

That in turn means, I suspect, that most practitioners will shun CICA claims, which presumably is precisely what the government wants them to do.

Those of us who entertain such applications know only too well that they are nearly always refused at first instance or lead to an offer of an insufficient sum on review.

Frequently, therefore, one is faced with appearing before the CICA tribunal, where, on one notable occasion, my firm succeeded in turning an offer of £1,000 on review into an award of £172,000 following a tribunal hearing.

Of course, if solicitors and/or counsel do not appear in these cases, the CICA is effectively wiped out at a stroke as a compensatory body.

It is more politically acceptable, one suspects, to achieve this result through the back door than by openly abolishing the fund.

Marcus Nickson, KJ Commons & Co, Carlisle