Slghtly ironic that at the same time as the Legal Services Commission are undertaking a consultation around legal aid, in order to develop the CLS to be, amongst other objectives, "cost-effective" that the Department for Constitutional Affairs have released figures of legal aid payments to barristers under both criminal and civil categories revealing the top paid criminal QC, James Sturman, recieved over £1 million in fees in 2004/05, and a civil QC, Paul Storey snaffled £448,000 in 04/05, £552,000 in 03/04 and £449,000 in 02/03.

More information on the QCs and their earnings can be found on the DCA website

These, I should remind people, are the same barristers who recently threatened to go on strike because....legal aid rates are so poor. See the Guardian Story 6 June 2005 for example

Given the fact that papers such as the Metro in London went with this as their front page story today, is it any wonder that there appears to be a lack of support across government for a financially robust and well supported Community Legal Service, when, to the larger population, legal aid equates to fat cat lawyers scamming the system?

And now it has come to pass that Criminal legal aid barristers have begun strike action - for more information, have a look at the Guardian story, Lawyers begin legal aid pay protest.

So, is there anyone in the voluntary advice sector up for some secondary picketing in defence of our poorly paid barrister colleagues then?

On a related tip, I've been on holiday for the last week, and I saw news stories with legal aid mentioned in the following contexts:

- Daily Mail carrying a story about the scandal of travellers being given legal aid in planning disputes (i think the total figure was somewhere in the region of £70k!!!)
- News of the World with a hang em and shame em special, expressing disgust at the lack of payments made to victims of the 7/7 bombs, as well as being scandalised by the fact that the defendants in the later failed attacks will recieve legal aid to pay for their defence lawyers;
- Guardian flagging up the strike call by barristers, in a report also noting the high earnings of some QCs. Also, an article by Marcel Berlins noting the deterioration of the legal aid scheme, from justice for all, to justice for the very few.

This continuing image problem for legal aid should be properly addressed by government if an adequate system of justice for all is in any way to be maintained. Barristers state that the government are plotting against them by releasing misleading information about their earnings, they point to the fact that their rates of legal aid have remained unchanged for 8 years or so, yet they fail to comment on the obscenely large rewards that some of their colleagues collect byway of legal aid work. Whilst I would support them in their actions in principle, I find it rather more difficult in practise when the earnings of one highly paid legal aid QC equates to the total budget for many individual voluntary sector advice agencies.

As a self-employed barrister, I would like to point out that the earnings of Queens Counsel and Leading Juniors are not representive of barristers doing 1 - 10 day Graduated Fee cases (98% of all Crown Court cases).

Under Graduated Fees a fixed fee is paid. No fee is paid for preparation, written work, waiting, traveling or any item of work other than actually appearing in Court.

It is not just the fact that these fees have been cut, they were very low to begin with.

Barristers must pay all their admisinstrative expenses out of the fee recieved. They must allso pay for the training of pupil barristers. They also recieve no sick pay, holdidays, maternity leave or pensions.

My overheads average to £42 per day. Additionally I pay Clerks Fees of 7.5%. The fixed fee for any non-trial hearing is between £46.50 and £100.

If I undertake a bail application I therefore earn £1 before tax.

If I spend all weekend preparing a trial, which through no fault of mine is adjourned, I earn £10 (50 pence per hour)

Undertaking a 3 day GBH or rape trial, I would earn £14 per hour.

Under current Graduated Fees rates, a barrister conducting a three day trial every week and non-trial hearings on the other two days would make a profit of £25,000 per year. That includes working a 50 hour week and every weekend to prepare the trials. In practice, you cannot expect every trial to be effective. Only about 70% of trials actually start when they are listed.

A newley qualified barrister, starting practice £30,000 in debt, doing mainly non-trial hearings, would be lucky to make more than £8,000 per year.

I would actually be better off claiming the dole than undertaking any non-trial hearing at the current rates.

The reason silks and Leading junior earn so much is that they rarely do Graduated Fee trials.

Last year I represented a client charged with 37 burglaries of elderly women. The police and CPS had completley failed to review the charges at all. I spent 50 hours working on the case, reading and cross-referencing 5,000 pages of material. By doing so I was able to point out to the CPS that 27 of the Victims, when asked to stand on ID parades had, said that the Defendant definatley was not the person who burgled them. Moreover, it was impossible for the Defendant to have committed all the burglaries, as when I plotted them on a map it was clear that 18 burglaries had occured at the same time at locations over 20 miles apart. I spent a weekend putting my findings into a ten page letter to the CPS and inviting them to accept pleas to the three burglaries the Defendant admitted committing and drop the rest of the charges, of which she clearly had not committed.

The CPS did so. Justice was done, £75,000 in court costs were saved and 37 elderly victims did not have to come to court.

My fee for all this work under the new rates would be £290. Bearing in mind I had to book a week out of court to plough through the evidence, the overheads I would have clocked up doing the work would be £210. After paying clerks fees I would be left with a pre-tax profit of £61.15. A wage of £1.22 per hour.

Nobody can afford to work at these rates. That is why junior barristers are refusing work. We are not "striking". We just cannot afford to turn down other work in order to work for the govenment at rates of less than the minium wage.

Quoting the income of the top 0.0001% of criminal barristers to prove that barristers are paid too much, is like quoting the income of the Chairman of Tescos to prove that check-out girls are fat cats!

Thanks, barrister, for putting some context on this important current situation - however, there are 2 points that I still wish to make.

1) Comparing the top QCs and junior barristers with the Chair of Tesco and checkout girls isn't IMO, in this context, a relevant comparison. My points were about the fact that top earning QCs have, individually, enough money coming in every year that could fund one law centre or CAB or independent advice agency - when the Legal Services Commission are undertaking a review of the CLS (of which the civil side is being squeezed to death due to, amongst other factors, rising criminal legal aid costs) in order to make it more cost effective, I do find it quite outrageous that one criminal QC can earn in excess of £1million from legal aid (and that, in the main, from a collapsed trial from what I understand).

2) Why is it that the Bar Council, the Law Society, whoever else could be seen to be representative of barristers, utter not one word about realistic ways to limit the strain on the legal aid budget when top-earning QCs walk away with such a massive amount of the legal aid budget?

Remember, most people posting on here on in the not-for-profit sector - by nature there are a lot of volunteers giving time for no reward, or people working long hours on low salaries; and we're subject to restrictive monitoring regimes that take the focus away from clients; to the CLS failing, year-on-year, to give contracted agencies annual increases in payments, thus forcing reliance on core funding to cover shortfalls; and all to try and help our clients.

In essence, it probably is the case that out situations aren't that far apart at the lower end of the scale - however, at the other end of the scale, I've yet to come across a CAB boss on £1million a year, or a local authority WRU boss getting £500k per annum.

Barristers are in a pickle because they're feeling the pinch, but for many of the rest of us, we've been pinched so hard that we're positively squeaking now, and I hope we can look forward to the legal profession as a whole, profit and not-for-profit, coming together to look at ways that we can ensure that access to justice remains a real and valued part of our society, rather than the domain of those with the money to afford it.

You make a very good point. In answer:-

1)50% of the Criminal Legal Aid budget goes on 1% of cases. The problem of disclosure is really a problem caused by the CPS and police failing to do the work they are paid for. The CPS and police are meant only to serve relevant unused material. In practice, as this would require them to sift through the papers themselves, they don't bother to do so. For junior barristers undertaking Graduated Fee work, this simply means we have to do the job of the CPS unpaid, sifting through thousands of pages of unused material to find the few pages that are actually relevant.

The case you are refering to was a software priarcy case. As such it was a "Very High Cost Case" and not subject to the Graduated Fee system. The Silk and his juniors on this case would have been paid £100 to £250 an hour preparation. In this case the CPS decided to serve 3.8 million pages of unused material on the Defence. Once served the defence lawyers had to read it. The case should never have been brought and the CPS should never have served all the material they had.

I agree that nobody should be earning these type of sums, but the real problem is that defence lawyers (unpaid in 98% of cases and paid in 2% of cases) are having to do work that should have been done by the CPS. If the CPS reviewed cases properly and only served relevant material, the crimianl legal aid budget would immedatley fall by at least 50%. The Govenment is fully aware of this, but choses to balme defence lawyers as it is too scared to blame the police and CPS, who are really responsible. I do not justify £1 million being paid to a silk. However on the collapssed jubile line fraud the CPS spent more public money that the entire Criminal Graduated Fee budget! In other words the CPS managed to wast more by prosecuting a case that should never have been prosecuted that the entire Bar charged the public purse for prosecuting and defending 98% of the criminal trials brought in a year!

2) The Bar Council proposed to Lord Falconer a set of proposals that would have immedatley reduced the Legal Aid budget by £150 million, by reducing the fees of Silks and putting £9 million into paying the junior bar (who do 98% of all cases. The junior bar was only asking for our fees to be increased in line with inflation (having been frozen for 8 years) and to be paid for the work that it currently unpaid. This would have cost 0.002% of the whole legal aid budget and would have avoided a "strike" by 98% of barristers.

Lord Falconer refused and cut fees to junior barristers by 46% overall. We feel that the Lord Carter review probabley will untimatley recomend that the fees of silks are slashed and the fees of junior barristers are raised. However, since Lord Falconer has just cut junior barristers fees, despite stating last year that he recognised that they were already too low, we have no faith that Lord Carter's proposals will be implemented.

In fairness to the Silks, they were prepared to see the fees slashed to the bone, provided Lord Falconer put some of the money into paying the junior bar properly.

Lord Falconer refused however to be bound by the last review of Graduated Fees and simply implemented the cuts.

On point (1), this is the sort of information that often doesn't get discussed at all so its valuable to begin to understand why these massive payments come about. But surely these are also exactly the kind of cases that barristers should be refusing to take on, under legal aid, if the criticism isn't going to arise in the first place?

I understand that some work is going on in the DCA around "Very High Cost" cases and from what you've written, its not before time. And unfortunately, from the public viewpoint, the media publicity given to such cases invariably adds to a perception of fat cat lawyers getting rich on legal aid which, in turn, makes it easier for the Government to penalise everyone involved in delivering publicly funded legal advice.

I do wonder why Lord Falconer seems so antagonistic towards the profession though (especially when we have barristers as PM and wife) - you wonder whether other parts of government are applying pressure due to their well-publicised dislike of challenges to Governmental policy?

Do you have any links for the proposals made under point (2)? I'd interested in something brief, just for my own info really.

As I said previously, I think a wider awareness of the pressures that both criminal and civil legal aid providers are facing and a more united approach that better understands these pressures would maybe help in overcoming some public prejudices against what is, essentially, the poor relation of the welfare state.

On point (1), barristers cannot refuse to take on the case, because we are bound by the "cab rank rule". This requires a barrister to take on any case as long as it is within his competance and pays a reasonable fee. Barristers can therefore refuse to conduct any Graduated Fee case, but no barrister could decline to represent a defendant in a VHC case.

The main action being taken is to abolish juries in fraud cases. However this would not really make any difference. The Jubile line fraud and similar cases would still have cost the same as virtually all the money paid out was for sifiting through the absurd number of pages served by the CPS in these cases.

The new rates are in SI No.2621 of 2005. Whilst claiming to do somthing about the "fat cats" silks rates for a VHC case remain at £160 per hour. This is a cut, but it is still a very high wage. The new rates still leave the junior bar working for between 20p and £14 per hour on Graduated Fee cases, hence the anger from the juniors.

Link for point (2) is www.barcouncil.org.uk and the document "Bar Council Response to the Consitutional Affairs Committee inquiry to Legal Aid."

One of the main reasons for the increase in the Criminal Legal Aid Budget has been the enactment of the Proceeds of Crime Act 2002 (POCA). This makes it an offence for a lawyer to accept any money from a person who has been charged with a Schedule 2 Offence.

Pre-POCA, defendants such as those in the jubile line fraud would have been refused Legal Aid on a means-test basis and would have paid privatley, recovering their costs if aquitted.

Post POCA, all the Defendant's assets are frozen. He then has no means and qualifies for criminal legal aid. If convicted his assets are confiscated and given to the Prosecution Authorities. In effect therefore, money is moved from the Legal Aid budget into the pockets of HM Customs & Excise / the police. A simple solution would have been to make Legal Fees a "prefered debt". This was put forward by the Bar Council and Law Society and as usual was ignored.

Well, you've certainly opened my eyes quite a lot.

The POCA seems to me to be yet another example of an ill-thought-through piece of legislation that our present government is so good at.... I seem to remember "joined-up thinking" being set as a priority under the Social Exclusion Unit - HA! (cept its not terribly funny).

Nothing is ever as clear-cut as it seems, is it?

Thanks again for taking the time to respond, much appreciated.

Paul

Do you know of any CABx that have a budget of £1,000,00 a year?

My guess is that, if there are any, they are a very very few big urban bureaux. None of the bureaux I know have anywhere near that budget.

I don't Gareth, but I wouldn't mind a slice. Many advice centres in London rely on Association of London Government grants of £20k to £40k a year, supplemented by other funding as and where available - the ALG have agreed a spend of £3,389,445 on funding 79 agencies under their Legal and Advice Funding stream for 2005/06.

Obviously total budgets for agencies will usually be more than simply the ALG grant but it does give some idea of the disparities I talked about. But see "barristers" comments which again, I feel, give a better context than maybe the simple comparisons that I was making before.

Hmm, I haven't checked all your maths, but...

"Quoting the income of the top 0.0001% of criminal barristers"

If we assume that the earnings of only 1 criminal barrister were quoted then that would imply that there are 1,000,000 of them in the country.

On that basis I can understand that competition would drive earnings down, or was it, possibly, exaggeration?

Sory, Should have read 0.01%. But I think the point is still valid!

This reminds me of junior doctors - the people at the bottom are under unbelievable physical, financial and emotional stress, but negotiations on their futures are conducted by and between people at the top no longer under the same stress and now in receipt of large (or very large) salaries who can no longer properly remember the pain they once felt at the bottom, but somehow feel that the system must be good because it filters out undesirable applicants who cannot stomach the hard years.

(They also don't want anyone new not to have to suffer what they had to suffer themselves.)

Both systems (doctors and barristers) result in male-orientated hierarchies dominated by people whose families had the money to support the financial problems engendered by such a system.

It's all rather sad really.

I'm 10 years call. For the last ten years (in fairness to the bar coucil) the number of men and women coming to the bar has been equal. And people like me from ordinary backgrounds could qualify.

But your are right. These cuts will mean only people with from rich backgrounds in the future will be able to come to the bar. So much for Lord Falconer's Equality and Diversity policy!

In response to a Parliamentary Question about the number of barristers on strike currently, Bridget Prentice, Parliamentary Under-Secretary for Constitutional Affairs replied:

'The outrageous and irresponsible action by members of the Bar is taking place in only two parts of the country. Barristers are self-employed and take individual decisions about their work, so we have no figures on the numbers involved

I wrote to bridget on 20th September, saying I would keep working at the current rates as long as she donated the difference between her salary from public funds and the average earnings of a junior barrister to Live8.

Neither Bonno or Sir Bob have contacted me to confirm receipt of a cheque from bridget for £58,000.

So I'm on strike, playing poker on line rather than in Court for a take home profit of 80 pence. So far I'm doing better as a card player!

dunno. have you thought of writing bridget the musical, while you have time on your hands? there could be a bit of a market opening up in 'whitehall farces' before the 'mind your mouth' legislation really bites on the art world, and 'outrageous and irresponsible' are pretty inspiring lyrics, crying out for a good song and dance routine.

granted, 'irresponsible' is a bit problematic in terms of really good rhymes, but it wouldn't have held up the likes of some of those old masters. i'm definitely not in that league, but i could offer up 'mandible' 'gullible' 'indefensible' 'quibble', 'nibble' and 'kibble' (which is catfood) - i see a 'consumable' theme emerging - you could probably work in 'cannibal' and 'hell', with the right tune! not sure if you'd get away with 'dribble... but i don't see why not! it could definitely work...

i see a big number, in a boardroom setting, going from 'staid and slightly pompous' to 'hot' with some flimsy and surprisingly skimpy nether region costumes and foundation garments, when they all get up to dance on the table... i suppose the temptation to try and work an animal or two into it is best resisted, even if you could find a sponsor for an elephant...

: )

have a nice weekend all.