TOP-PAID Queen’s Counsel, who can earn £500,000 a year from the legal-aid fund, are the prime target of a cost-cutting review to be announced by ministers today.

The Lord Chancellor will reveal a package of £140 million in cuts to the £1.1 billion criminal legal-aid scheme that will result in fees for top QCs and solicitors being reduced and put under tighter controls. It could cause some small legal firms to go out of business.

Lord Falconer of Thoroton has drawn up plans for cuts as part of a deal with the Treasury that will win him a longpromised strategy review of the whole purpose of the £2.1 billion legal aid scheme. But the move will cause anger among barristers, where discontent at rates of pay for trials lasting up to ten days — the vast majority — is already likely to explode into strike action.

Pay rates were pegged for eight years and Lord Falconer has not agreed to a date for a review. The Bar has set him a deadline of July 16. So-called high-cost trials, the one per cent of criminal cases that absorb 49 per cent of the criminal legal aid Crown Court budget, will be a primary target.

Recent figures released by Lord Falconer’s department showed that the ten highest-earning barristers from criminal legal aid all earned more than £500,000 in 2002-03, the latest year for which figures are available.

The Attorney-General has already announced plans to abolish juries in complex frauds and to replace them with a judge sitting alone.

Today’s package will also include plans to slice £15 million from the fees that lawyers earn for working on cases in which the accused pleads guilty, or on trials that collapse at the last minute because the defendant switches from a not-guilty to a guilty plea.

In most cases fixed fees or contracts are paid but where lawyers are still paid by hourly rates, these will be strictly controlled to stop the rate being inflated. For solicitors the squeeze could lead to more small firms going to the wall. Solicitors who want to provide criminal legal aid services will be able to do so only if they win a contract from the Legal Services Commission: and they will have to demonstrate a need for legal advice in that area of the country.

The controversial proposals floated this year for competitive tendering, in which law firms must compete in a price war for block contracts of work, are expected to go ahead in London and, if successful, be extended nationally. But while the criminal legal aid budget is being squeezed, Lord Falconer will also announce plans to strengthen the network of advice centres for civil disputes.

This will include a salaried scheme in which lawyers or advisers will be employed by the Government to give advice on civil matters such as housing, family problems, welfare and debt.

Guy Mansfield, QC, chairman of the Bar, said: “We are seriously concerned that the Government’s legal aid strategy appears to be falling into disarray. We have repeatedly been promised a May 2005 review of the 95 per cent of trials that last up to ten days. To date nothing has happened.”

Long “high-cost cases” had already been reviewed and brought under a scheme that cut their costs last year.

“Any further cuts will be in areas where deep cuts were made last year,” Mr Mansfield said. “The important government principle of consultation appears to be thrown out of the window and vital public services are now being reformed on the hoof.

“No one concerned for the health of the criminal justice system wants things to get worse, but that is the way precipitate government policy is taking us.”

A spokesman for the Law Society said that it would not oppose cuts for the “high-cost cases which take such a large proportion of the criminal budget”. But the society does not favour abolition of jury trial for fraud cases, now under review; or the proposals to force solicitors to enter a bidding war for criminal legal aid work.

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