I read the articles by Lucy Scott-Moncrieff and Adam Makepeace with interest (see [2010] Gazette, 11 March, 12). I was formerly a sole practitioner for over 20 years, involved in mental health work all that time. I have been working with Duncan Lewis as a freelance consultant mental health solicitor for two years.

Practitioners are not to blame for the increasing demands and constraints of legal aid practice. These are politically driven. All of us are trying in our different ways to make it work. I suggest that the issue we now need to press, following the transformation of the LSC into an executive agency of the Ministry of Justice, is that pointed to by the House of Commons Public Accounts Committee. PAC chairman Edward Leigh MP noted that the LSC lacked the basic information about the costs and profitability of law firms which would enable it to know whether it had set its fees at an appropriate level. We cannot allow the MoJ to continue to operate in wilful ignorance of financial realities – and we need to make sure our legislators remain conscious of these, as well as of underlying legal, social and political imperatives.

Leon Silver, London