Mention £1-million-a-year legal aid barristers and Tim Dutton, QC, gets “very angry”. “It’s a thing of the past,” he says. “And what makes me so angry about it is that we have 4,000 barristers doing publicly funded work . . . and the Carter report \ actually discloses that 30 per cent of barristers under three years’ practice are earning less than £10,000 a year on publicly funded work.”

Even the new fees scheme coming into force this month for complex lengthy cases will mean that QCs in middle-tier cases — including some terrorism and murder trials — are paid just £89 an hour. In the private sector the fee would be £500, he says. “So there’s a real danger that we’re not going to be able to attract the best advocates into the hardest cases.”

This scheme will be the Bar chairman’s first fight. Dutton, 50, has just assumed leadership of the 15,000-strong barristers’ profession, and high-cost cases — the 100 trials that absorb 50 per cent of the Crown Court legal aid budget — are set for a new fees regime this year.

Dutton accepts that fees must be controlled. But the proposed scheme is “unsatisfactory”, carrying the risk that a two-tier service may develop, with the best barristers declining the most important cases. “We must not espouse schemes that are inflationary or have perverse incentives; nor must the State weaken representation by espousing schemes that detract from quality or create a second class of representation for those less fortunate than the wealthy.”

The new Bar chairman does not hail from the legal-aid ranks but from one of the heavyweight commercial sets, Fountain Court Chambers (as did two former Labour ministers, Lord Falconer of Thoroton and Lord Goldsmith, QC), where he specialises in professional negligence work.

But he is no rarified commercial practitioner. He mixes his practice with public law and is described in the professional directories as a “serious silk who . . . blazes a trail for others to follow”. His empathy with the Bar’s rank and file was honed as leader of the South Eastern Circuit from 2004 to 2006 when legal aid was a prominent issue — and as vice-chairman last year when he led the team responding to the Carter review. It is one topic that gets the thoughtful and quietly spoken Dutton fired up.

Another is international human rights. His wife, Sappho, is also a criminal barrister — her family were driven out of Burma only to go to East Pakistan (now Bangladesh) where civil war broke out. So they moved again, to West Pakistan, and she finally came to university in England. Her experiences, in part, prompted him to set up the Burma Justice Committee to defend human rights and democracy there.

The marriage has also given him insight into discrimination within the profession. Twenty years ago, “one or two judges might affect not to hear my wife in court. They would see a black or brown face and were unreceptive. It may not have been deliberate discrimination and was probably subconscious. Things have improved hugely but the idea that it should happen at all is wrong.” The Bar has made strides, with its equality code and diversity groups on the Bar Council. “But of course we must keep plugging away.”

What are his own burning topics for 2008? The future of the Bar under the Legal Services Act is clearly one: Dutton believes in the “referral” model of the Bar and is against the idea of barristers in partnership (to be consulted on this year) because it would reduce customer choice. A recent survey by the Bar Standards Board found some support for what are called alternative business structures. But many of those supporters, Dutton thinks, are lawyers working or employed by companies or business. “I tend to think — if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it. So I have a strong preference for keeping advocacy through the independent referral model.”

His strategy is not purely defensive. Dutton is concerned about law firms’ advocacy departments which, he says, “may be causing firms not to instruct barristers until errors have been made by inadequate in-house work”. People should be encouraged to come to barristers earlier — and in some cases directly, particularly in a global market where a UK barrister can be instructed by a local firm in India or the Gulf.

Not that he wants to rock “good working relationships” with English solicitors. But he does want to promote barristers’ skills, to remind people that they should approach a legal problem with the aim of seeking a solution “and that means thinking: barrister first”. While he’s at it, he is pitching for solicitor-advocates to come under the regulatory umbrella of the Bar, rather than the Law Society. “Cheaper — by a massive degree.” And with a strong voice in public, Parliament and the media. “Why go elsewhere?”

Crown Prosecution Service advocacy is another target. Crown prosecutors are regularly doing pre-trial hearings and then leaving the Bar “to pick up the pieces” by not doing the trial itself. The Director of Public Prosecutions has written to Crown prosecutors to ensure that they comply with agreed principles on this. Meanwhile, Dutton has lined up with the Law Society to oppose the use of unqualified staff to prosecute trials in magistrates’ courts.

But the big fight is in legal aid — affecting up to 40 per cent of the Bar — and in particular what is called “one-case one-fee”: this, with price-competitive tendering, will mean that solicitors pitch for work and pay the barristers out of an agreed fee. The idea does not serve the public interest, he says. “Work in the Crown or family court cannot be commoditised or treated like a can of beans.

“If the Government uses its monopoly as the single source of money for legal aid to force solicitors and barristers into one-stop shops by 2011, doing block defence work, it will inevitably see fees shaved further, which will diminish quality, on either the solicitors’ or advocates’ aside, or both.”

Such talk goes to the heart of Dutton’s new constituency. But, he insists, it is not mere self-interest; lawyers, in a democracy, uphold the rule of law. If the profession is weakened, people might say — who cares? Dutton’s answer: “The voiceless, the prosecution in a rape cases, the victim of serious crime, the family fighting to keep their children.”

Key facts on Tim Dutton and the Bar

* Born 1957 (father school teacher and JP, mother a nurse); grew up Richmond, North Yorkshire
* Educated Durham Chorister School; music award to Repton School; Keble College, Oxford
* Called to the Bar (Middle Temple) 1979
* Married Sappho Raschid-Dias 1987 (one daughter) and lives in London
* Leader, South Eastern Circuit: 2004-06
* Recorder since 2000; QC 1998
* Various Bar Council committees 2001 onwards — vice-chairman 2006-07
* Enjoys music (plays French horn) and sailing his yacht in the Solent and to France

* Profession dates from 13th century
* Outnumbered 9:1 by solicitors — 11,500 barristers in private practice (5,000 in 1979)
* 3,500 barristers employed in commerce, industry or government
* Regulated by the Bar Standards Board and the four Inns of Court
* All barristers must be called to the Bar by an Inn of Court
* Queen’s Counsel total 12,000 (two thirds of whom are men)
* Called to the Bar 2005-06: 794 men and 722 women (of whom 444 from overseas)

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