An announcement to break the deadlock over the controversial quality assurance scheme for advocates (QASA) is ‘imminent’, the director of the Bar Standards Board said yesterday.

Vanessa Davies told the conference of employed barristers in London: ‘There has been an impasse [between the BSB and the Solicitors Regulation Authority] but we have moved beyond it and we are on the brink of making an announcement.’ She said the seven-year route to implement the scheme had been ‘tortuous’, but the ‘prize’ of ‘one scheme for all criminal advocates, with judicial evaluation at the centre’, was within sight.

At the same event, the chair of the Advocacy Training Council and former bar leader Nicholas Green QC said barristers should welcome the scheme, which he said is of ‘immense and constitutional’ importance.

He said: ‘It is the first scheme in the world to limit the rights of audience of advocates to appear in court according to quality.’

The world will be watching, he said, and what is implemented in England and Wales will be followed by many other jurisdictions.

QASA creates a common set of standards at four levels of experience for all advocates. Advocates will be able to appear in court only in cases at the QASA level they have achieved.

The planned scheme is primarily concerned with addressing Crown court advocacy and those advocates who want to work on Crown court cases (QASA levels 3 and 4) will be required to have their performance assessed by a judge in court.

The SRA opposes this proposal, instead suggesting that plea-only advocates should be able to do non-trial work at the higher levels without being judicially assessed.

The scheme has been developed to address concerns about advocacy standards. Green said there are concerns that ‘advocacy standards are under threat’, though he such concern is ‘not universal across the board’.

There is, he said, ‘systemic pressure on standards’ due to the way advocacy services are bought and paid for by the government. This has the effect of devolving the system to solicitors, who because of declining legal aid fees increasingly need to keep cases in-house rather than refer them to the self-employed bar.

He suggested: ‘They [solicitors] have an economic incentive to put the lowest cost advocate in court, as it’s the only way to remain profitable. The advocates used are not bad lawyers, but they are often inexperienced and have pressure put on them by their bosses to do work that is beyond their ability.'

Green said advocacy is ‘intangible’. He said: ‘It is a performance art that cannot easily be assessed or calibrated.’

Good advocacy, he said, is evident while bad advocacy can leads to increased costs, delays and lower quality decision-making. He supported judicial evaluation as a ‘key’ part of the assessment of Crown court advocates. ‘Who can judge performance better than the judge?’ he asked.

Green raised concerns over the use of plea-only advocates. He said: ‘There is a perverse incentive for plea-only advocates to get clients to plead guilty, because that is the only way they will be able get paid for doing the job.'

He was against the SRA’s idea that plea-only advocates should be assessed in assessment centres, likening that to ‘an actor asking to be judged at a dress rehearsal rather than by the live audience’. Advocates wishing to be assessed in that way might give the impression that they are ‘not up to the job’.

Commenting on the ‘minor falling out’ over the issue between the SRA and BSB, Green said: ‘There will be a resolution, because there has to be, and the profession will just have to swallow it.’