Fat cats living high on the hog of taxpayers’ money – or impoverished toilers at the front line of the criminal justice system? Lawyers who do legal aid work have always had a bad press and no one shed a tear when ministers announced radical reforms to curb the soaring costs of the £2 billion legal aid scheme.

Lord Carter of Coles, Whitehall’s Mr Fixit, was hired to devise a scheme and, announcing his reforms in 2006, memorably declared the end of the £1 million a year legal aid barrister.

He proposed that hourly rates of pay, an incentive to slow work, be scrapped and replaced by fixed fees. Most controversial of all was his plan for a market system with lawyers bidding for contracts for legal aid work.

Implementation has been moving slowly ahead since – with concessions and changes wrought by both the Bar and Law Society after hard-fought negotiations and in some cases judicial review challenges in the High Court.

Most criminal trials are therefore now covered by fixed fees, but the bone of contention, fees in the biggest and most complex criminal trials, may be the hardest one to crack.

Ministers and the Legal Services Commission (LCS) argue that the Carter package involved a levelling out – more money for the bottom of the Bar, with the QCs at the top taking a cut.

The legal aid scheme was plagued with opportunities to milk it to the limits; changes to bring in efficient working methods were long overdue. So is the Bar reneging on a deal as the LSC has alleged?

It says not: a bitter war of words has broken out and the Bar’s fury could be taken as the trades-union squawkings of a well-paid group now feeling the pinch.

Legal aid work does not provide the lucrative million-pound briefs of the commercial or chancery bar. It is work done by about a third of the Bar – with a higher proportion of young, women and ethnic minority barristers. They choose it because they are committed, as Peter Lodder, QC puts it, “to serving the public, are conscientious and prepared to put something back into the system”.

The courts are in crisis: this fees dispute is already hitting trials – so barristers do not appear to be bluffing. If the criminal justice system is to work well, it needs good lawyers both to prosecute and defend – or see miscarriages of justice result.

Taxpayers should not have to pay legal aid lawyers the high rates enjoyed by their commercial colleagues, but the fee must be adequate to ensure that the best still want, and can afford, to do the job at all.

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