Restrained action by legal aid solicitors

Lawyers providing state-funded legal services are more than justified in being at the end of their tethers.

Successive governments have made solicitors jump through hoops that in many instances seemed to have been placed bureaucratically and arbitrarily in front of them.

Those who persevered with practice management standards, franchising, and block contracting exhausted themselves, only to be rewarded by two Lord Chancellors with pay freeze after pay freeze.To pile on the misery, a recent the Consumers' Association survey purports to show significant client dissatisfaction with the service provided by legal aid solicitors.

The CA clearly has an argument with the government over the functioning of the new Community Legal Service - an argument with which many legal aid practitioners would agree.

Sadly, the association allowed criticism to stick unfairly to the legal profession and therefore to detract from its main points.So the fact that a 'week of action' is being planned by members of the Legal Aid Practitioners Group is hardly shocking.

What is perhaps surprising is how restrained they are planning to be, considering the financial and administrative pressures currently imposed by the government.

There will be no mass downing of tools for a week: instead practitioners will be encouraged to make a statement by boycotting publicly-funded work for a day and temporarily removing CLS promotional material from their practices.The message is that legal aid solicitors are fed up to the eye teeth and many of them are not prepared or able to take it any more.

However, they will stop short of an outright strike because ultimately their main concern is the clients, many of whom are from the most disadvantaged sectors of society.

That is the type of commitment that the Lord Chancellor and the government are failing to recognise.