Plugging the cracks

The plan to fund 200 students and trainees is a belated recognition of the problems facing legal aid - but Fiona Bawdon asks whether it is enough

The Legal Services Commission's plans for grants for legal practice course students and trainee solicitors (see [2002] Gazette 13 June, 1) is an innovative and imaginative response to the lack of imagination shown for years by the Treasury and Lord Chancellor's Department.

The LSC plans to fund 100 legal practice course students and 100 trainee solicitors annually, at a cost of 1.5 million in the first year.

If all goes according to plan, the first LSC-sponsored trainees could be in place at firms this autumn.

Let's hope the scheme works as intended and really does attract a band of dedicated, talented recruits who otherwise would not come into legal aid.

What better legacy for LSC chief executive Steve Orchard as he heads off to retirement? Forget the Blair Babes - stand by for the Orchard Offspring.

Welcome though the scheme is, if legal aid rates had not been held down for so long - and to hell with the consequences - it would not be needed.

The profession could have continued to fund the training of the next generation of lawyers in the way it always has.

The scheme is probably the most concrete evidence yet that the LSC knows that after years of static legal aid pay rates, something has to give.

With this scheme - no doubt for political reasons - the LSC is acting as though recruitment at the entry level is an isolated problem which can be tackled in isolation.

Problems at entry level are only the most acute symptom of a structural problem with legal aid.

It is much easier for people to decide not to enter this particular area of law - because of low pay and low status - than it is for those already in it to jump ship, which is why the LSC and the Lord Chancellor's Department seem to believe they can continue to ignore the problem.

A survey of 200 firms by the Law Society (see [2002] Gazette, 4 July, 1) found that more than a quarter said they planned to drop criminal legal aid if rates did not go up.

But drop criminal law to do what, exactly? Re-train as conveyancers? Become astronauts? Legal aid lawyers in some areas of work, like family, can move into private work relatively straightforwardly.

But there is no easy switch for criminal lawyers and few can imagine doing any other work.

And it is just this kind of commitment and inertia which the government knows it can rely on - at least in the short term.

However, if the LSC wants to get a return on its training investment, it will need those it has funded to make their careers in publicly funded work - which will only happen if legal aid is a good career option.

If firms cannot afford to pay their new solicitors a decent salary once they qualify, what is to stop those who have taken advantage of the LSC's largesse sticking around for a couple of years (as they are obliged to do under the scheme), and then joining the exodus into better paid, private work?

If the government finds it is squandering its own money in this way, maybe it will finally focus its attention on the need for more money for legal aid firms, generally.

The LSC would not have come up with the grants scheme if it were not convinced there is a widespread, structural problem with the numbers of new recruits.

Given this, there is something faintly comic about the number of grants actually on offer in each legal aid district - three trainees are to be parachuted into the whole of Yorkshire and Humberside, four into the north-east, 15 into London.

As Legal Aid Practitioners Group chairman David Emmerson says: 'With 10.5 million people in Greater London, that's one trainee for every three-quarters of a million people.

They're going to be busy...'

Fiona Bawdon is editor of the recently launched specialist magazine for legal aid practitioners, Independent Lawyer