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I practiced law under the Ontario legal aid scheme before becoming an English criminal solicitor and going through the process of obtaining a Criminal Defence Contract, and then closing my practice several years ago. What struck me about the English legal aid scheme and where I could see a problem was that legal aid in other jurisdictions such as Canada, is a right of the defendant, and it is he/she who applies directly to the legal aid board. Once granted a certificate, he/she instructs a solicitor of his or her choice and any lawyer can represent any defendant. The legal aid rates were derisory so only those lawyers who wanted to do the work bothered with it. The result was that the government could set whatever rates it wanted and the fewer the lawyers who wanted to do legal aid work, the more work the remaining lawyers got. They were also not precluded from refusing to work for legal aid rates and could charge privately. Supply met demand, no one went represented and a criminal bar developed with low overheads and lawyers who were young and eager to get legal aid work which would lead on to working for cash.
There was also a Duty Solicitor scheme which employed a handful of lawyers in each city who fanned out to the various court and gave advice and limited representation in guilty pleas.
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Where the UK government went wrong was to try to reduce the budget for legal aid by engaging in a decades long plan to construct a system of provision of criminal legal aid services through franchising and contracts and all that went with them. Had they simply cut the legal aid rates, the market would have taken care of the rest. Firms that didn't want to work for peanuts could have got out of criminal work and clients would have taken their legal aid certificates to low rent solicitors who didn't mind working from their homes with minimal regulation.

It's not too late to rectify this. Duty Solicitors may end up only representing those who attend court without a solicitor and plead guilty, and handle police station call outs for those arrested who do not have a solicitor. In cases which go to trial, the government will have to adopt a system like that in Canada, allowing solicitors to act on a fixed fee legal aid certificate. There should be no restriction on this because, after all, it is a basic principle of free and democratic societies that a person should be able to hire any lawyer he wants and it should not be the government which dictates who has the right to work as a lawyer for a client who has a criminal charge against him.

Criminal solicitors didn't help themselves either because they constantly took a position which made it look as though legal aid was their entitlement rather than the client's right. Had they argued that it is a human right to use state benefit to hire the lawyer of your choice and the right of a professional to represent a client and to accept a lower remuneration if he and his client so chose, this crisis might have been avoided.