The numbers of students who can train as barristers could be capped in a move by the profession to reduce wastage and widen its appeal to the best from all backgrounds.

A committee set up by the Bar Council under the law lord Lord Neuberger is examining whether to limit the number of graduates allowed to take the costly Bar Vocational Course (BVC), which is the first step to becoming a junior barrister.

The move was proposed in an interim report yesterday as part of a move to make the Bar more representative of Britain at large.

At present it remains overwhelmingly independent-school and Oxbridge dominated, with 80 per cent of barristers from the top socio-economic backgrounds.

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Other options include: making would-be barristers take a new aptitude test; a higher entry threshold and changes to funding.

Lord Neuberger, chairman of the working party which produced yesterday’s interim report, said: “The fact that the Bar is a very competitive profession certainly does not mean that it should only recruit from the social or economic elite.

“But there is a perception among the less well-off that the Bar is a place for people from public school and Oxbridge.”

Of the wide-ranging reform package to encourage the brightest people from all walks of life into a Bar career, he said: “This is an idea whose time has come.”

He denied that restricting access to the BVC would increase elitism rather than reduce it.

“We are concerned there may be an argument that too many people are doing the BVC,” he said.

“Some of the recommendations and ideas we are looking at could be directed at reducing the number of people - and at first sight there is a contradiction there.

“But it is not a contradiction. What we are trying to do is ensure that the people who are best equipped to be a barrister seek to do the BVC.”

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