Over the past few years our news and features pages have been filled with reports of the funding crisis afflicting the legal aid system.

We make no apology for that, as a properly resourced state funded scheme is crucial to access to justice and the wider social good.

But the battle over legal aid should not detract from other areas of the justice system that are likewise being starved of adequate investment.

This week we report on the annual review of the civil division of the Court of Appeal.

In it, Lord Justice Brook, the recently appointed vice-president of the court, issued a damning indictment of the government for failing to invest properly in new technology.

In addition, Lord Phillips of Worth Matravers, the Master of the Rolls and the president of the Appeal Court, highlights the increasing drain on resources caused by an inexorable tide of time-wasting litigants in person who persist with hopeless cases.

There is a small but interesting irony here.

If those litigants had received comprehensive legally aided advice at an early stage, then perhaps they would not have developed into disaffected obsessives.

But the wider point is even more important, which is that it appears that the civil courts are losing out to the criminal courts in terms of new IT and facilities because of the public outcry over crime.

It must be banged home to ministers that an adequately resourced civil justice system - including a modernised Commercial Court for London - is a requirement of a modern democracy.

And that means covering everything from paying fair wages to state funded lawyers, to ensuring that all lawyers and their clients have available to them modern and efficient courts.