Press headlines about fat-cat lawyers minting it from legal aid are a bad sign for some solicitors and their clients – they tend to herald further assaults by the government on access to justice.
The Sunday Telegraph and the Sun both ran stories at the weekend about six criminal barristers who had each earned over £500,000 in a year from legal aid. It also named the law firms that earn the most from civil legal aid.
The pieces quoted justice secretary Chris Grayling, trotting out a familiar refrain about the country having ‘one of the most expensive legal aid systems on the world’.
‘I think the public might well raise an eyebrow at the considerable sums being paid year on year to some practitioners,’ he was quoted as saying, adding ominously: ‘It's very important that we continue to bear down on its cost, not least because we can't have aspects of it that undermine the credibility of the whole legal aid system in the eyes of the public.’
According to the reports, the figures had been ‘disclosed’ by the Ministry of Justice. I couldn’t find the data on the MoJ website so I called to ask where the figures had been published, and why. The ministry emailed the lists to me, saying they’d been disclosed following a parliamentary question by Labour MP and shadow justice minister Andy Slaughter.
What the ministry did not tell me was that Slaughter had tabled a question asking for the names of the 25 highest-paid legal aid lawyers some nine months ago - in February - and, when he did not get an answer, again in April.
Neither did they tell me that the information had been given to the newspapers before it had been given to Slaughter. The papers ran the story on 8 December, but the letter that justice minister Lord McNally wrote to Slaughter answering his question is dated 10 December.
Slaughter took the matter up with the deputy speaker, Dawn Primarolo, raising a point of order. He asked: ‘Is it appropriate to wait nine months for a question to be answered and for it to be leaked all over the Sunday press the day before the answer is received?’
Primarolo advised Slaughter to take the matter up with the procedure committee.
What bothers me more than the breach of parliamentary procedure is the way the government has sought to misuse information about lawyers’ payments to fuel its misleading argument about the cost of legal aid and its need to make more cuts – plus, making no differentiation between civil and criminal legal aid.
Slaughter asked the question back in February during the passage of the Legal Aid, Sentencing and Punishment of Offenders Bill, to see if there was fat that could be trimmed from the system. The press quotes ministers’ ‘alarm’ at learning how much silks are paid and the absurdity that millionaire criminals are given legal aid to fund their defence, as though these are new revelations.
But during the parliamentary passage of LASPO, many critics, including the Law Society and Labour MPs, sought to encourage the government to look at cuts that could be made to criminal legal aid.
The answers seem straightforward: if the fees paid to senior criminal barristers in very high-cost cases are too high, cut them. In fact, why should there even be a separate rate for silks? And I agree with the ministers who think it is ridiculous that millionaire fraudsters and criminals get legal aid.
The bar and the Law Society have been making the same point for some time, urging the government to allow the restrained assets of wealthy criminals to be freed up to pay for their defence, instead of draining the shrinking legal aid piggy bank.
But the government, perhaps because of an unwillingness to take on the bar over the first two points, and the Treasury on the latter, has so far failed to address the points – instead it has taken the easy route and hit the vulnerable – making the lion’s share of legal aid cuts fall on the civil budget.
So, a word of advice for Chris Grayling: one way he could prevent the credibility of the whole legal aid system from being undermined in the eyes of the public would be if he stopped spinning misleading information to the press, and if he adopted policies that were fairer.
Catherine Baksi is a reporter on the Gazette
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