The incoming Lord Chief Justice, Lord Phillips, has suggested that the answer to the problem of the spiralling legal aid budget will be to pare it down through other funding methods.

Speaking at a conference hosted by the Law Society last week, Lord Phillips, who will take over from Lord Woolf at the end of September, said current spending levels were unsustainable and called for more investigations into other funding means, such as insurance.


'Those who need legal representation for access to justice should get it - but should not necessarily get it from legal aid,' he argued.


Lord Phillips added that it was harder to come up with different funding for crime and family work, but said: 'What I suggest is that we look very carefully at family and crime to see that funds are being spent to the best advantage. Obviously lawyers should be paid for the work they do, but the system needs to be run more efficiently.'


Also speaking at the conference, shadow attorney-general Dominic Grieve said one way forward could be for the idea of a contingency legal aid fund to be revisited, although he said if that happened, 'we would have to completely reverse no win, no fee'.


But Law Society Vice-President Kevin Martin called for greater investment in legal aid, warning that society was currently 'staring down the gun barrels of a crisis'. He also slated 'insultingly poor remuneration', and unnecessary bureaucracy. 'The whole of the profession should be, and is, deeply worried,' he added.


Meanwhile, legal aid solicitors have expressed concerns about the Legal Services Commission's proposals for peer review. Legal Aid Practitioners Group director Richard Miller said although the system was clearly better than auditing, the use of independent solicitors did not in itself guarantee perfection.