The council of the Milton Keynes and District Law Society, whose members come from both large multi-branch firms and one-man bands, welcomes the result of the postal ballot on professional indemnity insurance as a re-assertion of the power of the solicitor in the high street and an example of the importance of local law societies.

We call it Profession Power.The idea for a special general meeting came from my society, and I as secretary was asked by the Millennium Group to draft the resolution which has just been passed.

My society also made a substantial financial contribution to the Millennium Group because we believed Chancery Lane was blind to solicitors' needs.Those Law Society Council members who voted to retain the Solicitors Indemnity Fund (SIF) should also examine their souls.

Are they so remote that they do not know, as the vote demonstrated, that what solicitors want is the freedom to earn their living in the way that they think best and can afford? As far as my society is concerned and, I believe, the Millennium Group, this vote is just the first step in a campaign wholeheartedly to reform the profession in Woolf style, and to make it competitive and profitable for the new millennium.

We hope that other local law societies will now realise that they can do something for their members if they are prepared to put their heads above the parapet.I do not know what went wrong with the SIF.

Writing in the Gazette, SIF director and Law Society Council member Andrew Angus pointed out that there are no insurance experts on the Council.

One suspects that this explains the situation.

It will need consideration at a l ater date.The pressing task facing the Council, if it is not to lose the confidence of the profession, is immediately to comply with the resolution.

It would take only a matter of minutes for someone to sit down and compile a list of the minimum requirements for a professional indemnity policy, and a matter of seconds for the Council with its powers under the Solicitors Act, to say that all solicitors who could produce such a policy could practise under it.I am told that the Council will not consider the result of the ballot until June.

This is unacceptable and of no help to those who are having problems in meeting their SIF premiums.

They are rather like the third class passengers on the Titanic - locked in the sinking ship, while captain, crew and the high and mighty take steps for their own self-preservation.Is the Council of the Law Society as a whole so remote from the profession that it has forgotten to whom its first duty lies? Are so many of the members like the one described to me by a secretary of a local law society somewhere north of Watford: 'He's been there too bloody long and he doesn't read his bloody papers'.There will of course be Council elections at which the old stagers can be removed, but any future reform of the Law Society's decision-making process has to ensure that Council members are more readily answerable to their constituents, and that the constituents are an integral part of the decision-making process.

Profession Power again.For now, with the level of SIF premiums causing hardship, and some solicitors faced with losing the practices which support their families, politics must go out of the window.

Immediate and speedy action is called for.

The Council must comply with the resolution.

It must bend to Profession Power.