Plans to introduce the Quality Assurance Scheme for Advocates (QASA) have run into serious difficulties, it has emerged. The Criminal Bar Association appears to have withdrawn its engagement with the controversial accreditation scheme amid a dispute about linking payment to accreditation level.

In an email to members on Friday, CBA chair Max Hill QC said: ‘Progress on QASA has been halted so far as the CBA is concerned.’ The scheme as proposed would lead to ‘a world in which the word barrister would have no meaning, and no place within the fee structure’, he added.

The CBA is angered by Legal Services Commission plans to link the payment of advocates to the QASA level of accreditation, without any higher payment for silks.

Hill said the ‘revelations’ from the LSC ‘throw the reality of QASA into sharp relief’.

‘The ramifications are bar-wide; this is not a point about silks alone,’ he said.

Representatives from the CBA and the circuits met the Bar Standards Board this week to discuss their concerns about the scheme, which is being designed by the Joint Advocacy Group comprising the BSB, Solicitors Regulation Authority and ILEX Professional Standards.

He added: ‘Proper reflection from all sides may produce a solution. It is in everyone's interest to allow that solution to emerge.’

The Law Society and the Solicitors Association of Higher Court Advocates, which also have concerns about the design of QASA, have criticised the bar’s latest complaints about the scheme and its move to take their complaints to the judiciary.