So, the Legal Services Commission has suspended The Shaftesbury Group’s contract to provide telephone advice at the police station.

This comes a fortnight after we revealed that predecessor firm Bostalls - owned and run by the same people as Shaftesbury - had been placed into liquidation, leaving the taxpayer tens of thousands of pounds out of pocket.

This curious affair – Bostalls/Shaftesbury owner Andy Scripture says he set up the new company because he wanted to distribute golfing aids from Thailand – is surely deserving of further scrutiny.

Back in 2007, the then Law Society president wrote to the Solicitors Regulation Authority outlining a raft of concerns about granting a waiver to Bostalls, which allowed it to operate despite the fact that it was not owned by a solicitor.

Chancery Lane focused on the fact that the agency was an unregulated commercial body and the move pre-empted the establishment of alternative business structures.

‘There will be significant risks involved in the provision of legal advice by an organisation run and almost entirely staffed by non-solicitors,’ the Society’s legal aid manager Richard Miller said at the time.

How prophetic those words now appear.

The LSC won’t say why it has imposed the suspension, while the SRA is likely to face the awkward decision of whether to grant another waiver, this time to Shaftesbury.

We await that decision with interest.