Mediation ‘cannot be a substitute for justice’, the master of the rolls warned this week, in a view that appears sharply at odds with government proposals to replace many legal aid-funded cases with alternative dispute resolution.

Unveiling the government’s legal aid reforms this week, justice secretary Ken Clarke said he wanted to ‘discourage people from resorting to lawyers whenever they face a problem’, and instead encourage them to ‘consider alternative methods of dispute resolution which may be more effective and suitable’.

However, Lord Neuberger (pictured), master of the rolls, warned in a pre-emptive speech last week: ‘If we expand mediation beyond its proper limits as a complement to justice, we run the risk of depriving particular persons or classes of person of their right to equal and impartial justice under the law.’

He said that there is a ‘real question whether a concerted drive for an ever-expanding role for mediation’ is ‘consistent with a commitment to equal access to justice’.

Under the government’s plans, the £350m cut from the legal aid budget will be offset in part by increased use of alternative dispute resolution – especially for private family law cases.

Neuberger said: ‘It is an elementary constitutional proposition that the civil justice system is part of the third branch of government – hard though it sometimes seems to be for some people in the other two branches, the legislature and the executive, to grasp.

‘The courts system is not like the National Health Service, a service which the state provides to the citizen, fundamentally important though the NHS clearly is. The courts system is part of the state itself. To suppose the civil justice system is by nature a provider of services to consumers akin to a dispensing chemist, a shoe shop, a train operator and so on, is fundamentally – and dangerously – wrong.’

He added: ‘Mediation is a complement to justice. It cannot ever be a substitute for justice.’