HOW is it that the public regards the National Health Service as a national treasure but see legal aid as a gravy train? “I don’t think they do,” counters Carolyn Regan, who has spent 25 years with the NHS and three weeks at the helm of the Legal Services Commission (LSC). “People genuinely see legal aid as part of the social fabric of our country,” she says. “If you were to conduct a survey on the London Tube, even if people might never have heard of legal aid, 99 per cent would agree with the importance of access to justice.” But Regan quickly adds: “They might not agree with the way that it’s provided.”

It is a significant distinction. Legal aid is going through its greatest overhaul since it was introduced more than 50 years ago. There can be few tougher jobs than heading the LSC at the moment. The commission set out its strategy last year for providing access to justice, through community legal advice centres and networks, which was widely perceived as a threat to both firms and advice agencies. Carter set down his vision in July, proposing replacing fixed fees with hourly rates and introducing competitive tendering for criminal firms. The latter idea was rejected outright by one group of defence lawyers. At the same time the LSC proposed fees for the Carter reforms that Citizens Advice claims would, if introduced, jeopardise the future of one in five of its bureaux.

How does Regan feel about running an organisation that has already gone so far down a process of change so bitterly opposed by suppliers? “It feels like a golden opportunity,” replies a remarkably chipper Regan, who was managing director of NHS London NE before joining the LSC. “For a start, we’re now in the middle of the consultation and I can hear everybody’s views.” She claims to have “no baggage, no history” and so is well-placed to conduct what she insists is a genuine consultation.

Regan prides herself on being approachable. “There must have been few GPs or clinicians in North London who didn’t have direct contact with me,” she says. She is conscious that the absence of leadership at the commission (her predecessor, Clare Dodgson, signed off sick in May 2005 with a back injury) has been a problem for the profession and commission. “I think people are welcoming a strong message,” she says.

Has Regan been surprised (as Lord Carter of Coles was) by the antagonism between the profession and the LSC? Not really, Regan replies. She reckons that the mood is no worse than, for example, the introduction of new work contracts for GPs. “What I have heard at meetings a lot so far is ‘You, the LSC, don’t understand how difficult it is for us and you’re there to sabotage us”, she says. “That’s patently not true. We have as much interest as everyone else in making this work. No one is denying that demand for legal services is going up and we’ll have to work together to find a way of meeting that.”

The first thing to have fallen on her desk was the Law Society-commissioned economic analysis on the Carter reforms. It predicted that the impact on criminal legal aid alone would mean 800 law firms would go to the wall — double the number forecast by Carter. If the benefits of the reforms are to be delivered by economies of scale, what is an acceptable number of firms to have to shut? “I don’t have a figure in my head,” Regan says. “If we can improve quality, that’s what we should be doing. With or without Carter, would small firms be able to sustain themselves with existing volumes of work and overheads? These arguments are similar to those around GP practices. By the time I left East London we were opening GP practices with between 12 and 20 GPs; five years previously I was opening practices with only six GPs.”

While Regan emphasises that she is listening, she’s also going to take some convincing. “Some of the things lawyers have been saying to me that they feel are unreasonable, I have to say I feel are perfectly reasonable,” she says. “Peer review for a profession is not unreasonable. We went through exactly the same thing in the medical profession 15 years ago.” She has also been surprised about the strength of feeling against the fixed-fee rates. “

The data has already been shared with the representative bodies, mainly the Law Society and the Bar Council,” she says. But, above all, her message is that the LSC and profession are on the same side. “This can’t be an adversarial situation,” she says. “We’re in this together.”

The author is editor of Independent Lawyer. A longer version of the interview is in this month’s issue

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