What is the point of the Bar? As several hundred barristers meet in London this Saturday for their annual conference, it is a question they — as well as the public — might well ask. In the present recession their profession looks like becoming an enclave for the rich, both for those joining it and those using its services.

Desmond Browne, QC, this year’s chairman of the Bar Council of England and Wales, is acutely aware of those dangers. During his tenure there has been a series of proposed reforms to the £2 billion legal aid budget that threatens the service provided by thousands of lawyers, both in the criminal courts and family cases. “This year the Ministry of Justice and Legal Services Commission were at great pains to have us ‘celebrate’ the 60th birthday of legal aid. But once the candles on the cake had been blown out, it was clearer than ever that we’d been left in the dark.”

The concerns are not just about barristers lining their pockets — or, as Browne puts it, “about church mice trying to turn themselves into fat cats”. If barristers cannot make a living from legal aid work they will turn to the more lucrative private work. And, he says, they are doing so already. “Even before the current round of [family legal aid] cuts, one in four barristers had turned down at least one case in the preceding year because of the uneconomic fees and more than 80 per cent indicated that in the event of further cuts, they would limit their legal aid work.”

Criminal legal aid is no better. He accuses the Government of the “height of perversity” in tackling the fee differential between prosecution and defence fees by slashing the latter by as much as 23 per cent from the fee rate only agreed in the first place to restore the Bar to fee levels of 1996. a year, he notes, when the Bar took the Lord Chancellor to court over fees.

Legal action is always lurking on the agenda in this legal aid war (“we are certainly looking at it very hard”). But Browne makes the wider point that it is also a war on the public: “There’s every reason for the profession to feel betrayed, but what matters is that the public has every right to feel betrayed, too.” And he warns: “We are now heading for ... two standards of access of justice, dependent on the ability to pay. When the wolf is at the door, we can no longer be accused of crying wolf.”

The proposed cuts, he says, will hit the most vulnerable in society — from abused children to criminal suspects. The result will be a two-tier system in which the rich can pay for the best lawyers and the rest have to make do with the inexperienced or act for themselves.

The Legal Services Act 2007 reforms, Browne believes, pose another threat to access to justice — the theme of this year’s conference. Tensions are already evident between the Bar and the proposed archregulator of the legal profession, the Legal Services Board. The idea is that the Bar and Law Society will remain frontline regulators with the board maintaining light-touch supervision. Increasingly, though, the board is moving towards the direct supervision or Ofcom model: its chairman, David Edmonds, was a founding member of Ofcom.

The Act will shake up the way lawyers and others offer their services. The Bar Standards Board (BSB), the profession’s frontline regulator, will soon decide on whether to lift the ban on barristers setting up in partnership — with each other or with other legal professionals. Will these benefit the public? Browne is doubtful: access of small firms across the country to the Bar must be preserved, he says. “If the three leading sets of chambers in Newcastle go into partnership with each other or with solicitors, that would dramatically reduce client choice and access to justice.” It looks as if the BSB will agree.

Browne is just back from Zimbabwe to report on how the rule of law is faring under the coalition government. A world apart from the concerns of the Bar in England and Wales, but still the other end of the same “access to justice” thread: “It makes you realise that if access to justice and the rule of law start slipping, it is terribly hard to get it back.”

And ultimately access to justice and the rule of law comes down to high-quality lawyers. That is the point of the Bar, he would say. It has never differentiated between the quality of service to those who pay and those on legal aid. “Access to justice depends on equality of arms, not depth of pocket.”

ACCESS TO JUSTICE - JUSTICE FOR ALL? is the theme of this year's Bar conference on Saturday, November 7.

* The one-day event, at the Lancaster London Hotel, has an unrivalled list of leading speakers from the judiciary, the Bar and the wider justice system.

* A highlight is the "Question Time" session with panel speakers Diane Abbott, MP; Lord Carlile of Berriew, the independent reviewer of terrorism laws and President of the Howard League of Penal Reform; Dominic Grieve, QC, MP, Shadow Justice Secretary, and Jonathan Faull, Director General of Justice, Freedom and Security at the European Commission.

* Topics across ten specialist sessions include so-called "honour" crimes; access to justice in the commercial court; regional and international access to justice; family funding; mediation; victims of crime; treatment of women in criminal justice; and costs in Chancery litigation.

* The keynote address is being given by Sir Nicolas Bratza, Vice-President of the European Court of Human Rights, and there are addresses from Desmond Browne, QC, Bar chairman, and Fiona Jackson, conference chairman, of 33 Chancery Lane Chambers.

* There is also a session organised by the Young Bar (open to those under 10 years' call) that will debate the impact of the Legal Services Act 2007; entry and training; and on pro bono work.

More details from the conference organisers, Judy Lane Consulting:

01202 699 488 or office@judylaneconsulting.com; www.judylaneconsulting.com

Explore Law

• Columnists

• Law Panel

• Law Reports

• Student Law

Times Recommends

• BGC 'set aside £40m to lure Tullett brokers'
• Legal aid review to ensure value
• Fears as 21 magistrates' courts face closure