Report comment

If the Ministry's calculations constituted "a flawed analysis on which no reasonable authority would have relied", the possibilities seem to be that the Minister and his civil servants who brought in the regulations either do not understand statistical analysis, in which case they are not competent to do the work they do, or deliberately put forward arguments they knew to be false, in which case they were being deliberately dishonest. The fact that they chose not to disclose their flawed analysis in the course of the consultation suggests the latter.
Even if they had not appreciated the defects in their arguments when they first put them forward in promoting the regulations, they must have had the chance to see what was wrong with their reasoning once they were served with the details of the case brought by the Law Society, and a party acting in good faith might be expected to respond "Sorry, we realise we were wrong, and we need to go back over this".
Instead, they chose to go through with the litigation( in the hope that they could, once again, get away with a cut).
A solicitor who behaved with such an attitude towards a client or a court could expect to face disciplinary proceedings and , most likely, to be struck off. Will there now be an investigation of the Ministry's conduct, particularly bearing in mind the wasted expense to the taxpayer of the court proceedings that have just ended?
As it is, solicitors and barristers involved in the criminal justice system have long experience of being treated dishonestly by the government institutions that organise the Legal Aid system, with "consultations" carried out only so that the Ministry can say there has been consultation before the next cost-cutting change is brought in, as originally intended, and with consultees views routinely ignored.
The Ministry's only real objective is to pay less and less for the work done, and the only way in which the government's approach to payment is fair is that it treats the other parties involved in the criminal justice system, such as the courts themselves, the CPS, the police, the Prison Service and the Probation Service, in the same way.