CRIMINAL legal aid cases are often complex, involving poorly educated, socially excluded individuals. The proposed system will mean law firms competing for the right to take on legal aid work on the basis of price. There will be no differentiation between the simple and the complex case. As a result, lawyers will not have the resources to ensure justice in the more difficult cases — and those people will find themselves without access to legal advice.

The Legal Services Commission also proposes a fixed price per case, with suppliers seeing the case through from the police station to the magistrates’ court. It provides an example of a composite case price of £275 for that work, regardless of the complexity of the matter.

These changes will turn access to justice from a right into a privilege. It is entirely inappropriate to apply a business model of inputs and outputs to the criminal justice system where the “product” is liberty and the “consumer base” is the predominantly disenfranchised. The result will be to limit access to justice, reduce quality of services, destroy small firms.

Good quality practitioners are threatening to withdraw their services from the market rather than risk providing a poor service. In the United States competitive tendering has resulted in a justice system dependent on wealth, with those clients facing the most severe penalties, including death, being left unrepresented.

Price-competitive tendering will also discourage young lawyers from working in criminal legal aid. According to the Bar Access Group, the average debt for solicitors after the Legal Practice Course is £11,000 to £20,000, with that figure rising to £25,000 for barristers. Lawyers with such debt simply cannot afford to enter legal aid practice.

Like National Health Service nurses or doctors, criminal legal aid lawyers provide a vital public service, from which wider society stands to benefit. The present cuts will drastically erode that facility. The Government accepts that the plans will reduce the number of firms in London. The consequence will be new miscarriages of justice, at the expense of the public, victims of crime, their families and those wrongfully convicted. The changes will create advice deserts and damage the confidence of minority groups, while niche and ethnically focused firms will be pushed out of business.

Young Legal Aid Lawyers was formed to voice the concerns of the next generation about continuing cuts. www.younglegalaidlawyers.org

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