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Organisations such as the Big Law Firms as well as The Law Society promoted the view that there needed to be consolidation in the provision of crime related legal services. This means the extinction of small firms, the creation of large national entities and a limitation in choice for suspects and defendants.
This lead to the two tier tender and various price competitive tenders.
As a result of incompetence this failed.
The civil servants at MoJ are not interested in access to justice. They are only interested in cost. The belief is that the cost of criminal legal aid must be cut because it is too high. The reason it is said it is too high is because the civil servants believe it ought to be lower.
Over the years various firms and groupings have had secret talks with the Legal Aid Agency to come to an understanding about how this new worlds would operate.
Because of successful Judicial Reviews the policy was abandoned.
Cuts to legal aid are the civil servants way of punishing the profession for resisting change they wish to impose.
As a profession we have facilitated their approach by engaging mainly on the discussion of fees and failing miserably to deal with access to justice. If we had addressed access to justice I don’t believe we would be where we are now.
It is not too late. We must press for an holistic review of the justice systems to include an agreed definition of justice, an agreed understanding of how justice can be accessed and how that access can be assured.
The civil servants believe that justice is a service provided by the State which should be funded by those who use it and should not be a burden on the taxpayer.
Judges, Magistrates, Probation, Police, Solicitors, Barristers and Cilex have failed to challenge this approach. We have instead all gone along with it so long as we get less cuts than proposed.
We are pathetic.
The Law Society must stop talking to the Government and must start talking to the public about what is actually going on and what it means to them. The Law Society’s approach based on the idea that it is better to talk to Government or it could be worse, has failed big time. There have been too many cosy chats with MoJ officials and too much back slapping at pyrrhic victories and not enough confrontation and challenging of the MoJ mind set. We need to get better at propaganda and get better at undermining the MoJ’s plans. Our own Regulator is only too willing to ignore the Government’s failure to promote the s1 Legal Services Act 2007 objectives and instead try to force us to fill the gap created by Government policy. The SRA is a lame duck of a Regulator with a spine as weak as QPR’s defence.
What has to happen before our ire turns to action?