I have a great idea. Lets go back to the Solicitors Indemnity Fund model. I recall a friend and council member at the time telling me that voting to go to the market and leave the SIF was like a turkey voting for Christmas. How right she was. I followed her advice and voted against entry to the market but many of the current complainants didn’t do the same and seem to have forgotten that.

‘Simples’ - to quote the Meerkat.

Sally Perkins, Buckingham

I write regarding the serious threat to a sole practitioner’s livelihood posed by the PII situation and being removed from lenders’ panels. What I personally object to is our being lumped together by large banks and insurers as ‘high risk’. I understand why they may need to do this and therefore don’t care about my plight, but it is still grossly unfair. I would have no objection to being penalised if I had made errors in the past and had a poor track record, but unfortunately individual cases are not considered. I am not sure what anyone can actually do about this, but I do know sole practitioners are reluctantly having to take on ‘salaried’ partners they do not need just to get round these issues.

The irony is that they are far riskier propositions afterwards, as the Legal Complaints Service article in the Gazette recently proved - proportionally the most complaints come from medium-sized firms where control can easily be lost and mistakes covered up. I would also like to see published lists of claims actually paid out and the amounts paid, so we do not have to suffer the insurers’ arbitrary comments each year and early quotes up to 400% higher than the year before.Sean Crean, CoxCrean, Poole

Our firm has been in the small Cornish town of Callington for upwards of 150 years. I was admitted in 1952 and I am still practising part time with the firm, with whom I have been all my working life, from articled clerk to senior partner. We are a five-solicitor firm (two partners and three assistants) all of whom have been with us for some time. None of us have been in any trouble with the Law Society/Solicitors Regulation Authority and our insurance claim record has been clean for 10 years (other than ‘circumstances notified’, all of which are closed).

Notwithstanding this, our professional indemnity premium has this year increased from £18,743 to £33,635, simply (so we are told by our brokers) because of market forces.

Firms like ours will simply be unable to continue if the professional indemnity premiums continue to rise, or even stay at the present level. As another contributor to your columns has recently commented, just compare what solicitors pay with what our doctor and dentist colleagues have to pay for their professional insurance.

The profession is assailed on all sides and I regret to say that, in my opinion, firms of our size have been let down by the Society in recent years. With the separation of the regulatory function to the SRA, it was hoped that the Society would be better able to ‘fight our corner’, but sadly there is little or no evidence of this.

I have been proud to be a solicitor for over 50 years and am now thankful that I am nearing the end of my professional life, but I feel so sorry for the countless solicitors in ‘high street’ and rural practices who are trying to battle on with little apparent encouragement or support from the Society at the present time.

Am I justified in my views, or are these simply an old man's nostalgia for better times?

Peter Skinnard, Blight, Broad & Skinnard, Callington, Cornwall