Legal advice is ‘too expensive’ and has ‘moved out of reach of the middle classes,’ the chair of the Bar Standards Board said this week.

Speaking at Inner Temple, Lady Deech said: ‘The advice of a top barrister is affordable only by government, by corporate bodies and by wealthy individuals’.

She warned that this was detrimental to the rule of law.

Deech said the problem may be ameliorated by legal aid, insurance, pro bono, conditional fees and better use of technology, but there is still a void.

‘There are many, perhaps the majority of the population, who could never contemplate accessing the individual advice of a barrister or a City solicitor, and more so today than ever,’ she said.

Deech said: ‘It is reported, often with pride (certainly in the journals of the solicitors’ profession) that partners in City firms make £1 million a year, and that some barristers make similar sums from legal aid, let alone private work.’

But she noted that many barristers who undertake publicly funded crime and family work make only ‘the most modest of livings’.

Deech suggested that the richer end of the bar could to subsidise the less well off end.

In a speech that addressed the importance of the independence of the bar, Deech also looked at the issue of regulation, as the BSB considers whether to become an entity regulator.

‘We sail between the Scylla of fusion and the Charybdis of attrition of the bar.

'We do not want barristers to melt away from the Inns by joining solicitor-regulated entities because there is no alternative if they wish to change their business practices and become more corporate,’ said Deech.

At the same time, she said there is no point in the BSB offering to regulate, in the same way as the Solicitors’ Regulation Authority, entities that are identical in their composition to those that are naturally under the authority of the SRA.

Rather than either rejecting entity regulation altogether or going to the other extreme of regulating all legal entities, Deech suggested a middle ground in which the BSB regulated advocacy-focused entities.

There were, she said, risks attached to all options.

Failure to undertake entity regulation risked the fragmentation of advocacy regulation,, and the questioning of the need for separate independent regulation of the bar.

However, entity regulation brought with it the risk of expense, and the possible loss of professionalism at the bar.