Jack Straw has opened a “new front for reform” - as the Labour Party press release put it - with a blistering attack on the fees charged by lawyers under “no win, no fee” cases.

At the party conference this week the Justice Secretary outlined a series of measures to continue “the quiet revolution” of reforming criminal justice.

Forget the uncontentious stuff — online court records, so that sentences can be more visible to the public; and the scrapping of fees paid by the media for court lists. The main thrust of his speech was a “crackdown” on excessive fees charged by lawyers under the “no win, no fee” system, coupled with another attack on legal aid.

“It’s claimed,” Straw said, “that they have provided greater access to justice, but the behaviour of some lawyers in ramping up their fees in these cases is nothing short of scandalous.”

No win, no fee arrangements are a creature of government reform, brought in ten years ago to replace legal aid in accident cases. Lawyers can double their fees if they win to charge a “success” fee — making an hourly rate of as much as £600 in some cases. Straw wants to cap the uplift that lawyers can charge if they win.

The move comes just days after accusations from the British Medical Association that solicitors are encouraging a compensation culture on the basis that the annual bill paid out by the NHS Litigation Authority in compensation for claims had risen to £90 million a year — compared with nearly £41 million just four years ago.

Straw did not stop there. Turning his attention to legal aid, he said: “There are now three times as many lawyers in private practice but paid for by the taxpayer as there were three decades ago: the budget has grown faster than the health and education services.

“The challenge now is how better to spend these huge sums in the interests of the public and justice; something I want to do with the legal profession and local government.”

Legal aid spending per head in England and Wales is the highest in the world. “It’s as much as we spend on prisons.”

The comments have made a few headlines — and prompted a predictably angry response. Des Hudson, chief executive of the Law Society of England and Wales, has taken issue with the legal aid figures. ”An increase in the legal aid budget of £500 million since Labour came to power works out at about 3 per cent a year — a drop in real terms, taking inflation into account.

“Since the number of crimes for which offenders are brought to justice has increased from one million to more than 1.25 million, this means that lawyers are doing a lot more for less money.

“The costs of doing business and employing people have increased — so it is no wonder that the Government’s own research shows that solicitors’ firms doing legal aid are on the brink of financial collapse.”

As for the salvo over success fees, Hudson points out that people who have to pay lawyers’ charges are already entitled to challenge success fees, if they think that they are unjustified.

“The former Lord Chancellor [Lord Irvine of Lairg] agreed that the maximum success fee should be 100 per cent, because otherwise it would be uneconomical for lawyers to run cases that have a 50-50 chance of success — and people would be left without access to justice.”

Cutting the success fee will mean that lawyers are less willing to take a chance and bring a claim — and less access to justice, he said.

Giving back as good as Straw gave, Hudson added: “The Government removed legal aid from personal injury cases on the ground that conditional fees provided a satisfactory alternative. Restricting conditional fees in the ways suggested would be a fraud on Parliament and the public.”

To add grist to the mill, the Law Society has been asked to enter a pilot scheme for “virtual courts” — by which cases are dealt with in the police station, immediately after an arrest, via a video link to the court.

Sounds efficient? The only problem is that it means another squeeze on solicitors' legal aid fees. “Offering to take a pay cut to take part in a pilot scheme is completely unacceptable,” a society spokesperson said. “At best, solicitors will take part reluctantly and with no interest in working flexibly to make the system work. At worst, they will refuse to take part.”

Richard Miller, the Law Society official dealing with legal aid, said that solicitors taking part would suffer a large cut in the fees that they receive for those cases. That made it “highly unlikely” that they would reorganise their practices around virtual court hearings — and the pilot scheme would be scuppered from the outset.

Positions between ministers and the profession look set to become further entrenched. Lawyers’ fees are always a good target for politicians but if some success fees are excessive, the system is of ministers’ own making.

As with cuts to legal aid, ministers will have to make sure that in seeking to limit lawyers' fees, they don't throw the baby of "access to justice" out with the bathwater.

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