No, Mr Torr, you are wrong. I have received many telephone calls telling me that I have been involved in an accident and offering to give me advice, when there has been no accident at all. I have certainly never ticked a box on a survey that is at all relevant here.

I am frankly not that bothered about road traffic accidents, since it was clear to me before I retired from the circuit bench 12 years ago that, apart from interesting problems on credit hire, RTA proceedings had little to do with the law but were simply business disputes which increased the insurance premiums I and everybody else had to pay. What does really worry me is that these sorts of dealings enable Mr Grayling to describe our profession as an ‘industry’, thereby enabling him to destroy totally the legal aid system as we know it.

For what it’s worth, in 1975 I was the first solicitor to be appointed to the lord chancellor’s advisory committee on legal aid. Those were the days when the Law Society ran the legal aid scheme with an unlimited budget!

Peter Urquhart, Prenton, Wirral