The shadow justice secretary has dismissed the government’s proposals for reforming the criminal legal aid market as ‘pre-election posturing’.

Dominic Grieve QC said the plans outlined last week by justice secretary Jack Straw were ‘woefully inadequate to tackle the deep problems in the way legal aid has been run under this government’.

The proposals, which replace the abandoned plans for best value tendering, will see a ­consolidated market with fewer, but larger, firms contracting for bigger volumes of work.

The government anticipates the change could mean that up to 75% of the 1,700 firms doing criminal legal aid work will leave the market, but says those firms that remain will be able to take advantage of economies of scale, enabling them to deliver services more efficiently and remain profitable.

Grieve said the government has created a ‘mess’ over many years and its ‘systemic failings’ were exposed in the recent report on the Legal Services Commission by the National Audit Office.

The government ‘is unfit to get a grip on the problems now’, he added.

Straw said the change had to be made because the legal aid budget has grown from £545m in 1982/83, to £2.1bn in 2008/09, a 5% increase per year. He said the number of practising lawyers has more than doubled over the past 20 years, with the distribution of legal aid funding ‘too often skewed toward a handful of very highly paid individuals’.