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What people don't reaslie is the scale of these 'savings', i.e. the numbers involved, are tiny in relative terms. The entire criminal legal aid cuts aim to save £120million. As an illustration of scale:

The NHS spends about £120 million every 10 hours,
The BBC wasted £100m on one failed IT project.
RBS (82% govt owned) had a bonus pool of £500m this year, £607m last year - despite making a loss in both years.

And, in the longer term, beefing up the Public Defender Service is also more expensive that NOT making these cuts at all. It is plainly awful arithmetic - no money will be saved. Anyone who understand this should have genuine doubt about what the government's ture motive is.