Justice, the much-quoted saying goes, is open to all - like the Ritz Hotel. Access to the courts can often depend on the depth of a person's pocket, with some of the best lawyers coming at a prohibitively high price. But lawyers' fees aside, should the courts be a free public service, like the health service? Or should litigants who use them pay the cost?

People who bring or defend claims in civil or family courts have always had to pay a nominal fee. But in 1988-89, the Conservative administration of the time brought in the idea that civil courts should become self-financing: in other words, money reaped from fees paid by users should cover the courts' costs.

So court fees began to rise, culminating this year in a massive increase of about 2,500 per cent. For local authorities bringing care cases it meant a rise in fees from £150 to £4,500. The increases hit all civil and family courts, where people bring and contest claims for accidents, breaches of contract or for maintenance after divorce.

The policy has been highly controversial - and hotly opposed by judges and consumers. At the time, Sir Richard Scott, then the head of civil justice, called it unconstitutional and urged it be consigned “to the dustbin”. Civil justice, he said, was being treated as a “market-place commodity”.

Rumblings of protest carried on - to no avail. The Labour Government picked up the policy baton. Lord Woolf, then Lord Chief Justice, and the Civil Justice Council, which oversees the system, both spoke out and an amendment was carried to the Courts Bill in 2002 ensuring that in setting court fees the Lord Chancellor had to have regard to access to justice.

Did ministers have that requirement in mind in fixing the latest rates? The new disclosure of a £90 million budget deficit looks as if they are hoist by their own petard.

The Ministry of Justice denies that a fall-off in care proceedings is down to high fees, and insists that it has provided extra funds to councils to help with their costs. But there is no doubt that the shortfall in the courts' budget is down to a drop in fee income.

The cash crisis raises a wider point of principle: under the new constitutional “dispensation”, with judges in charge of their own territory, how protected is the money that is allocated to the justice system? The creation of the Ministry of Justice, which brought courts under the same roof as prisons, exposed the dangers - would money for courts be swallowed up because of bursting jails?

A compromise formula, with judges and ministers sitting on a new Courts Service board, ended a fierce stand-off. But the understanding was that the budget, once determined by the Treasury, would then be protected.

Now, it seems, courts across the board will be raided to pay for the pursuit of a policy that could both damage access to civil courts and undermine the quality of criminal justice at the same time.

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