I agree with the comments of Messrs Cohen and Emmerson regarding the Legal Services Board and the Equality Act. The Legal Services Board is straying into politics and its analysis is wrong. The major barrier to becoming a lawyer is financial deprivation rather than sex or ethnicity.

If your father is a doctor you will not face much in the way of obstacles to qualifying, as long as you are capable of passing the exams, regardless of your ethnicity, gender or sexual orientation. If you have been brought up by a single parent in social housing then you have much greater hurdles to overcome to become a lawyer, regardless of racial origin and so on. The financial cost of a degree and the LPC will be unattainable to many. That situation has not changed much in the last 20 or more years.

When the fundamental problem is a lack of resources, it is irresponsible to waste huge sums of the profession’s money collecting irrelevant data.

Michael Adie, Adie O’Reilly, Lincoln