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How far should solicitors go to help the government formulate its criminal justice spending plans and what are the red lines that cannot be crossed when it comes to cuts?

These were the questions underlying a thought-provoking speech given by the Law Society’s head of legal aid policy Richard Miller at last week’s criminal law conference.

Noting that the high-water mark of the criminal justice system was in the late 1980s - when lawyers were entitled to operate at all stages of the criminal process paid at an hourly rate similar to that charged for privately funded work - Miller said: ‘We have dropped from an excellent system to an adequate one.’

In the current fiscal environment, with ‘zero chance’ of the government putting more money into the criminal legal aid system, he said the best that can be hoped for is that rates are frozen until 2015.

So with that reality, he suggested it was in the interests of the profession to be proactive and come up with proposals to redirect funding and ensure that funding for those areas considered sacrosanct is not washed away by the tide of ‘receding resources’.

This need, he suggested was particularly pressing given the government’s intention to look again at plans to introduce price-competitive tendering for criminal defence services.

While the government has yet to come up with concrete proposals as to how this will work, the revised European Union procurement directive likely to emerge over the next 12 months will impose a greater emphasis on price tendering in the supply of legal services.

‘If you do not want to die the death of a thousand cuts, or have competitive tendering foisted upon you, the onus is on us to present the government with a cost neutral or better still cost-saving alternative. There is a lot to be said for trying to take more control over our own destiny, by coming up with our own proposals to put to government,’ he said.

Proposals mooted (for discussion, not as indication of Law Society policy) to squeeze savings out of the system included the government tendering for a small number of national contracts and requiring head contractors to sub-contract with independent firms around the country.

A more ‘evolutionary idea’, he suggested, would be to require firms to deliver the majority of their services in-house, rather than relying on agents and clerks, and to set minimum volumes of work that firms would be expected to conduct.

Another approach would be for firms to consolidate back-office functions while maintaining their separate identities and existence as independent businesses. This, he said, might enable firms to reduce overheads and improve their prospects of survival as rates shrink in real terms.

Some suggest that there is an over-supply of criminal solicitors and firms in London. To address that point, Miller asked whether the London duty solicitor scheme should be reformed, so that firms could only be on their local scheme and one from an adjoining borough.

And should the system be changed so that duty slots are allocated on the basis of firms, rather than individual duty solicitors?

Miller also asked about the merit of a system of block contract - where firms are paid a lump sum for the work they do, rather than on a case-by-case basis.

Miller touched on savings proposals already put forward by the Law Society - requiring the Crown Prosecution Service to meet the cost to the legal aid budget of dropped cases, and imposing a levy on the financial services industry to meet the cost of serious fraud cases.

On ways to redirect rates within current payment schemes, Miller suggested rebalancing the litigators graduated fee scheme so that less money is paid for really big cases and more on the more routine ones. Top-up fees might also be an answer, with legal aid covering a ‘basic service’ and clients paying an additional fee for anything more.

In a devil’s advocate moment, Miller even asked practitioners to consider whether all clients should be entitled to representation in the magistrates’ court.

‘If someone has been charged with, say, an assault, and they are insisting in the face of overwhelming evidence that they are not guilty, is that such a high priority that it is worth risking the ongoing viability of police station and Crown court services in order to provide it?

‘And even if there are some cases where it is essential, are there some that currently get representation where, realistically, justice would not be seriously impaired if they do not?’ he asked.

Miller asked what would be the impact on justice if representation in the magistrates’ court were replaced with an expanded court duty solicitor scheme and no own-client service, or conversely, if the court duty scheme should be abolished and the money saved put to better use elsewhere in the system?

Many will find some of these questions unpalatable to even consider, but in these challenging times, unpalatable as they are, they need to be considered, if only, as Miller said, to establish the red lines that cannot be crossed and need to be defended.

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So what does a lapdancer earning £200,000 a year have in common with a retired litigation partner from the Home Counties?

Nice legs, perhaps? Or maybe they were both paid with ‘Heavenly Money’ vouchers that wealthy clients slipped into their garter belts? Nope. The answer is more mundane: they have both just taken their former employers to court on the grounds, they claim, that they were unfairly dismissed.

Nadine Quashie, 29, was a dancer with Stringfellow Restaurants Limited until 2008 when, she claims, she was wrongly sacked after being falsely accused of dealing in drugs. She took her former employers to an employment tribunal, alleging unfair dismissal, but her claim was dismissed because she was deemed not to be an employee under the terms of the Employment Rights Act 1996, but to be self-employed.

This meant she was not entitled to have her case heard at the tribunal or to benefit from the protections that the law gives employees.

Undeterred, she took her claim to the employment appeal tribunal (EAT), which reversed the earlier decision, ruling that she satisfied the minimum requirements for a contract of employment to exist. These requirements are an element of control and personal service in the arrangement between herself and the club, and in particular a mutual obligation between them to provide and do work.

The EAT went on to find that Quashie was an employee on each night that she worked at the club and that there was also an ‘umbrella contract’ between periods of work. She is now returning to the employment tribunal to seek damages.

Quashie is believed to be the first ‘gentlemen’s club’ lapdancer to have succeeded in claiming employment rights and protection. Her solicitor, London firm Bindmans employment partner Shah Qureshi, said: ‘This judgment is a vindication of Nadine Quashie’s long struggle for employment rights. She worked under a contract over which Stringfellows had control and under which she was required to provide services for payment. There were mutual obligations that had all the hallmarks of an employment relationship and yet my client was denied her basic employment rights.

‘Dancers in clubs are often exploited due to their lack of employment status, including financial penalties for not working. The door is now open for them to assert their rights and for better regulation within the industry.’

So it was a great day for justice, then, a terminal blow struck against the exploitation of women everywhere? Nope - or, at least, not in the view of some of the people who read the story on the Daily Mail website. Three posters hoped that HM Revenue & Customs was on Quashie’s case because, after all, she was earning serious money. Another opined that the case was ‘proof that (the UK) is now a stupid, corrupt nation that has declined morally, ethically and socially.’

A woman poster commented: ‘YOU SHOULD KNOW BY NOW (sic) that the sort of women who blatantly exploit their bodies to get what they want will go further if given the opportunity - FAME AND MONEY (sic) is what they want next.’

The self-styled Crazy Joe was one of the few voices raised in Quashie’s support. He posted: ‘Good luck to her. Workers’ rights have gone down the drain in this country. Stand up and fight!’

The other case concerned Leslie Seldon, a former equity partner who claimed unfair dismissal on the grounds of age discrimination when, back in 2006, Kent firm Clarkson Wright & Jakes (CWJ) insisted that he retired aged 65.

Seldon took his case to a 2008 employment tribunal, a 2009 employment appeal tribunal, the Court of Appeal in 2010 and the Supreme Court in 2012. He was unsuccessful in all four applications, the courts accepting CWJ’s argument that it retired partners at 65 ‘as a legitimate business aim’ to allow younger solicitors to step up to partnership and to help retain talented lawyers who might move on to gain promotion. It was, the courts ruled, ‘a proportionate means of achieving a legitimate aim’.

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Journalists are sometimes accused of misquoting people (not me, you understand, just in case Lord Justice Leveson is reading). So let me give Jonathan Djanogly an opportunity to be quoted in full, without amendments.

Here is the justice minister, speaking in the House of Commons, on 17 April. He was asked why mesothelioma cases could not be exempted from reforms in the Legal Aid, Sentencing and Punishment of Offenders bill, as an amendment tried to do.

Cue Jonathan…

‘Amendments would create inconsistency and damage the wider goal of our reforms - to restore sense to the costs of litigation, which have been substantially increased by the way in which no win, no fee cases operate, largely to the detriment of defendants.’

It was clearly a resounding message, for it bounced across the central lobby of parliament into the Lords a few days later.

There, fellow justice minister Lord McNally was resolute, declaring that ‘to exempt mesothelioma cases wholly from our reforms would be to retain the status quo, undermining the package of reforms and allowing cases to drag on’.

Yet within 24 hours of these words, mesothelioma was exempted, plucked out of the bill and sent into the long grasslands of further consultation.

The government now wants a report into the effect of LASPO, though these is no indication how long it will take or who will be asked to contribute.

It is now almost a year since the Ministry of Justice published its consultation on LASPO, having listened to a variety of opinions for more than six months. What more can we possibly learn about the effect of this bill? The government wants more time to consider the implications of a Fund of Last Resort - rumoured to be coming this summer - but this has been on the cards for two years. Did it not cross the mind of the MoJ to take account of it in LASPO?

The irony is the claimant lobby should be happy to have secured one exemption, albeit perhaps only a temporary stay of execution. But the overwhelming feeling will surely be of exasperation that this debate had to be fought so hard. It always seemed ludicrous - bordering on offensive - for the government to lump mesothelioma cases into the compensation culture, with Djanogly only last week describing solicitors involved as operating a ‘racket’.

The government, at least, had showed some backbone in fighting its corner, arguing for the ‘all or nothing’ policy in the face of fierce opposition. To then U-turn at the last moment smacks of a lack of conviction and uncertainty - perhaps even doubts about the reforms of LASPO themselves.

And of course the government’s original position was right, in a way. Why should the mesothelioma sufferer be treated differently (in terms of right to keep their compensation) to a victim of gross clinical negligence? How can one person’s suffering be differentiated from another’s, simply because of the root cause?

Ultimately for the claimant lobby, there will be the feeling of a pyhrric, unfulfilling victory. The government has played the part of Mr Bumble, offering a few breadcrumbs long after most of the children have grown up and left the orphanage. An exemption will be welcomed, but it’s too little, if not quite too late.

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Perhaps the saddest element of the Ched Evans case is the effect on future victims of sexual offences.

Footballer Evans was convicted on Friday of raping a girl in a hotel room who was too drunk to give consent. The Sheffield United and Wales striker, who is going to appeal, was jailed for five years.

Within minutes of the verdict Twitter was awash with blame - not for Evans, but for the victim. She was accused of ‘asking for it’, inviting trouble by getting drunk and - ludicrously - derailing Sheffield United’s promotion challenge.

Within days police were looking into whether she had been named on social networking sites and the club was investigating tweets about the case reportedly made by Evans’ team-mate.

To compound the hideousness of this episode, two days after his conviction Evans was named by his fellow professionals in the League One team of the year. Surely someone could have foreseen how inappropriate his inclusion would be?

Rape support charities are understandably horrified. Rape Crisis (England and Wales) says that only 10% of rapes and sexual assaults of women and girls are currently reported. The charity says the aftermath of Evans’ conviction highlights what it has known for some time: ‘that harmful myths about sexual violence, and those who experience and perpetrate it, are still deeply ingrained within our society’.

Rape complainants have the legal right to lifelong anonymity and the breaching of that right is a criminal offence.

In the age of social media this will be increasingly hard to enforce but that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try. There are means of tracking down Twitter and Facebook accounts - for the sake of all victims, it’s worth using them now.

Women who report a sexual offence already have to face the ordeal of a court case and often the suggestion that they somehow encouraged the crime, either by walking alone or the way they dress. It would be a tragedy if their anonymity was threatened as well.