There’re off: slashing the £2 billion legal aid budget is not a huge vote-winner but that’s not going to stop ministers having a last thrust at pushing through cuts in the run-up to next May.

Lord Bach, the Justice Minister, may have won some points this week when he announced a review of the scheme, under Sir Ian Magee, the former senior civil servant, to look at whether the criminal and civil legal aid budgets can be split and the latter protected from the inexorable rise in the former.

Meanwhile, a host of savings remain on the table: proposed cuts of up to 25 per cent in criminal legal aid fees, cuts of up to 20 per cent in the fees charged by expert witnesses and of 10 per cent in the rates for advice given by duty solicitors at police stations.

Criminal legal aid is not alone. The Legal Services Commission is still debating what cuts to impose in family legal aid fees. MPs on the Commons Justice Committee have warned that if the proposed scheme for £12 million cuts goes ahead in its present shape, there is a serious risk of an exodus of experienced family lawyers.

It will be no different with criminal work, says Desmond Browne, QC, chairman of the Bar Council. The year is fast turning into the Bar’s annus horribilis. News of the latest cuts, delivered on August 20, was a “bombshell”, he writes in Counsel, the Bar’s magazine.

Legal Aid: Funding Reforms, the title of the Ministry of Justice paper, was a “deceptive euphemism, disguising the fact that the contents were no more than a catalogue of proposed cuts ... weeks before the Prime Minister first used the c-word in his speech to the TUC in Blackpool”.

Paul Mendelle, QC, the new chairman of the Criminal Bar Association, which represents 3,600 barristers, has also wasted no time in firing a salvo. “Ill-considered and cavalier cuts, such as those proposed recently, seek to drag defence fees down to levels that are already considered by many to be inadequate,” he says.

“They will fall heavily on younger barristers, most of whom are burdened by the large debt they incurred in higher education before coming to the Bar.” The result, he adds, would be “fewer and fewer talented young people, especially those from disadvantaged backgrounds, practising at the publicly funded Bar and will greatly reduce diversity in the profession”.

What will happen? The Bar and Law Society are galvanising their forces and uniting in opposition which they plan to marshal nationally and at circuit level. MPs will be lobbied and research commissioned on the impact of the cuts on ethnic minority lawyers — who are certain to be disproportionately hit, as they are more heavily concentrated in legal aid work and in smaller firms and chambers.

Lord Bach, the justice minister responsible for legal aid, is awkwardly placed. He has some sympathy for the profession and threatens the axe, at times, with apparent reluctance. But he is tasked with carrying out a political agenda.

He has refused requests from the Law Society to extend the consultation period on criminal legal aid cuts and also dismissed its view that the funding reforms were “incoherent and deeply flawed”. In reply, the Law Society Gazette reports, Bach says that the Ministry of Justice is operating to a strict budget and insists that criminal legal aid savings must be made to protect funding for civil legal aid.

In the meantime, the Legal Services Commission has agreed to delay its plans for tendering for criminal contracts from this month to December, including the pilots for online auctioning police station and magistrates’ courts’ work, so-called best value tendering. Tendering for civil legal aid contracts has already been delayed until the end of this year.

The commission accepts that these cannot go ahead while the fee rates are still unknown. But if ministers and the commission want to push through the tendering, they cannot delay much longer or they run foul of procurement rules. And then the spectre of judicial review raises its head.

Steve Hynes, director of the Legal Action Group, says: “The problem with all this is that the wheels will come off the legal aid wagon if they don’t get the fees rates published. They then can’t go ahead with the criminal legal aid [tendering] reforms and Lord Bach becomes a lame duck.”

So the room for manoeuvre is tight. But is this a battle ministers really want to fight in the run-up to an election? There are doubts about whether the tendering plans will save more than £3 million in the first year — so they may not be worth the powder and shot.

Similarly, Jack Straw’s plans to cut legal aid on prison law is thought unlikely to save much, even though it is a good headline grabber. Hynes points out that the cuts will squeeze lawyers’ pay — by as much as one third.

“We don’t argue that fixed fees for prison work are wrong in principle. However, as with other areas of legal aid to which fixed fees have been applied, we do have fears that the amounts being proposed could potentially undermine quality.”

There are areas where legal aid could still be trimmed, he adds. One is the costs of the most serious cases in the Crown Court. As Roy Morgan, chairman of the Legal Aid Practitioners Group, points out, these few cases cost the taxpayer £680 million a year. “Furthermore, the costs of prosecution need to be better controlled,” Hynes adds.

The Ministry of Justice can’t expect to escape Whitehall budget cuts. The Treasury expects the legal aid scheme to contribute to the £1 billion savings that the department must find. The Legal Action Group, which is happy to condemn legal aid wastage and abuse where it exists, says this is unacceptable.

“Legal aid cuts in the midst of a recession,” a recent editorial in the LAG newsblog says, “would be like making health cuts during a flu epidemic. It would be impossible to impose such cuts without risking miscarriages of justice in criminal cases and reducing access to justice in civil cases.”

Time is not on ministers’ side. If the Conservatives win the election in May, budget cuts will be on the agenda just the same as now. But a new government may look for bigger fish to fry than a few millions from a pared-down legal aid budget whose annual costs amount to running the National Health Service for two weeks.

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