Between them justice secretary Jack Straw and former civil servant Sir Ian Magee hammered the final nail into the coffin of the Legal Services Commission this week.Straw accepted the proposal of Magee, made in his review of legal aid governance and delivery, to transform the LSC from an arm’s length non-department public body into an executive of the Ministry of Justice.

Magee’s review, commissioned by the MoJ, followed the qualification of its accounts for 2008/09 and two highly critical reports of the LSC by the National Audit Office, and the Public Accounts Committee.

Since it was created more than 10 years ago, Magee said the LSC has undergone ‘considerable change and reform as it moved to commissioning, procuring and paying for services’.

‘It has moved a long way from its roots in the Legal Aid Board as personnel and focus have changed,’ he said, and its role has developed ‘piecemeal’.

He concluded: ‘There is too much that requires fixing to leave things as they are.’

In particular, Magee was scathing of the financial management within the organisation, which he found to lack even ‘basic financial controls over fund expenditure’.

‘It is surprising that, with responsibility for such large sums of public money, the LSC appears to have no overall system of integrated internal financial control,’ he said.

No doubt most practitioners will regard Magee’s findings as statements of the flipping obvious, which many have drawn attention to for some time.

So the question has to be asked how the LSC had been able to get away with things for so long? Why has it been given such a free rein for so long? And why did the MoJ, which has been so concerned with making budget savings elsewhere, not step in earlier?

After all, such lax financial management within law firms doing publicly funded work would not have been tolerated by the LSC.