Legal aid lawyers have accused the Legal Services Commission of wasting ‘millions’ on the tender process for the very high cost cases (VHCC) litigator’s panel.

The LSC announced last week that the panel will be scrapped in July, after being in place for only two years.

Chairman of the Legal Aid Practitioners Group Roy Morgan said: ‘The tender process was monumental. The LSC must have wasted millions on it. Add to that the sheer waste of time and money for those solicitors who spent days working on applications to go on the panel, and the cost is immense.’

Ian Kelcey, chair of the Law Society’s criminal law committee, said the ‘cumulative cost [of setting up the VHCC panel] to the profession and the LSC may well be in seven figures’.

Following a short ‘informal consultation’ with panel members last month, the LSC announced that the scheme, which allows panel firms to carry out work on the most serious criminal cases, will end when the current panel contracts expire on 13 July.

The panel arrangement was set up in 2008 amid great controversy over pay rates and the tendering process, with the aim of restricting work to those firms with suitable experience.

In March, the LSC announced that the panel would be suspended when the current contracts end. The commission said that, because it had to wait for the outcomes of connected government consultations on legal aid fees, there would not be enough time to run a new tender exercise.

From 14 July, litigators instructed on cases classified as VHCCs will operate under an individual case contracting arrangement.

Firms will still be subject to eligibility criteria, which will be the subject of a further consultation later this month.

An LSC spokesman said: ‘We feel that the consultation exercises have been important and we have now reached a position whereby we and the profession agree that individual case contracts are the best way forward for litigators working on VHCCs.

‘We are maintaining the level of quality established by the panel through an ongoing accreditation process. The VHCC panel introduced a level of experience-based quality for litigators for both non-fraud and fraud VHCCs. The panel was created based on a 5% reduction in the VHCC rates (originally 10% prior to an interim increase in rates in Nov 2008).’

Meanwhile the LSC has admitted that it has had to recruit more staff to cope with a backlog in dealing with some bills due to a rise in the volume of civil certified claims, which are up by more than 50% on last year, and an increase in cases where additional or missing evidence is required.