Solicitor advocates have condemned plans to roll out the ‘bar-centric’ and potentially ‘unlawful’ Quality Assurance Scheme for Advocates (QASA) next April.

More than 200 attended a meeting in London this week to voice their opposition to the ‘deeply flawed’ scheme, which some claim is ‘designed to exclude solicitor advocates’.

A poll of those present revealed that 90% were against the plans to introduce a compulsory quality assessment scheme for criminal defence advocates who do publicly funded work. They questioned the need for the scheme and called for evidence-based research to investigate whether there is any problem with declining standards of advocacy.

A briefing on the scheme drafted by SAHCA chair Jo Cooper and SACHA committee member Roger Sahota said: ‘We believe that this bar-centric scheme has been designed by and for the bar, who have supplied the only higher court advocate to JAG.

‘We believe their new-found enthusiasm for QASA is not so much about quality-assuring their own members, but about excluding as many of ours as they can.’

SAHCA opposes the allocation of offences across the four QASA accreditation levels and the requirement for regular and recent trial advocacy, which it says will tend to exclude those with mixed practices, who work part time or who combine advocacy with litigation.

It said the requirement at the scheme’s higher levels of regular trial advocacy at the same level will tend to exclude anyone not working in a large chambers of full-time advocates.

The SAHCA brief said: ‘In each case these pre-qualifying criteria will prevent many solicitors of undoubted competence being eligible to seek evaluation, whether judicial or by assessment centre, because they have simply been ruled out of the scheme by design.’

SACHA welcomed the Solicitors Regulation Authority’s concession that some aspects of the scheme (including in relation to youth court cases, the requirement for trial advocacy and the case allocation between QASA levels) would be reconsidered.

But it called for other changes, including the removal of judicial evaluation in assessment centre appraisals; the implementation of quality assurance of judicial evaluation; and a restructuring of payment rates.

SAHCA also wants a full pilot of QASA before it is implemented across the country.

Cooper and Sahota’s briefing said: ‘The present scheme is deeply flawed. It may be unlawful.’

Sahota said that if the difficulties were not satisfactorily resolved, solicitor advocates may look to a judicial review or other possible legal remedy.

Cooper told the London meeting: ‘SAHCA wishes to see a quality assessment framework that is independent, objective, and fair in the sense that it applies equally to all advocates regardless of professional background and does not discriminate on account of ethnicity, gender or practice type.’

QASA has been developed by the Joint Advocacy Group, a committee comprising representatives from the SRA, Bar Standards Board and ILEX Professional Standards.

The BSB representative on JAG is criminal barrister Sam Stein QC, while the SRA is represented by its head of education and training, and another SRA employee Mandy Gill, neither of whom is a practising advocate.

Roger Sahota, SACHA committee member and one of the meeting’s organisers, said: ‘We will be asking the SRA to expand the membership of the JAG to include a board member with higher rights to match representation from Sam Stein of the BSB and for SACHA to have direct representation on the Quality Assurance Advisory Group.’

‘Solicitor advocates are key stakeholders in this process and we should be properly represented and our views must be taken into account,’ he said.

Cooper said there is an ‘inequality of arms’ between the representation of the bar and the representation of solicitor advocates on JAG.

He said: ‘The development of QASA is not simply a regulatory job, but requires input from people who understand the practice of advocacy and the advocacy market.’

Chair of the Criminal Bar Association Max Hill QC rejected the suggestion that QASA had been developed with a bar-centric bias.

‘If there are complaints, which are dressed up as suggestions of a bar-centric scheme, the reality is that those making the complaints are interested in reducing the quality of those involved in representation.’

‘Everyone should be interested in high standards - that is the only justification for the existence of QASA.’

He added: ‘If this scheme is to come in, it must set a quality threshold at every level that is as high as possible in order to fulfil the public interest. There should be no notion that the scheme is designed for anything other than maintaining the highest standards of advocacy.’

Hill said that to present the scheme as one which the bar is happy with, was not correct, as it also had reservations about it. But he said: ‘The criminal bar does not fear that it will be found wanting on quality by QASA.’

In particular, he said the bar opposed any suggestion that there should be a scheme for advocates who only do plea hearings. He said: ‘It would not serve the public interest, which requires that every criminal advocate must be capable of advising at all stages of cases.’

Hill said the bar was also against assessment through mock trials in an assessment centre, other than in exceptional cases, preferring instead the option of judicial evaluation. If the assessment centre approach is adopted, he said there should be an element of judicial evaluation, although he said the details had not been finalised and there was room for discussion on the issue.

He said the bar had the ‘greatest reservations’ about the place for QCs in the future of the scheme, and suggested that the solution should be for silks to be left outside it.

The meeting was organised by the Solicitors Association of Higher Court Advocates, the London Criminal Courts Solicitors Association, the Criminal Law Solicitors Association, the Black Solicitors Network and the Society of Asian Lawyers.