The commercial debate about referral fees overlooks one simple fact – a referral fee is the purchase price for a client.

A profession that holds itself out as adhering to the highest standards of ethical practice should not have anything to do with buying and selling people. That is just about as unethical as it gets, whatever the practice might be in other sectors.

The suggestion in the recent Legal Services Board report that clients do not mind this is nonsense. I frequently have to explain the relationship between legal expenses insurance (LEI) and panel solicitors to clients who have chosen my firm to represent them and then discover this may not be possible because of the LEI which, in many cases, they didn’t even know they had.

Without exception, when I explain that their own insurer may be making a nice profit by selling the claim to a solicitor at the other end of the country, and that there is little they can do about it, they tell me that it leaves a very unpleasant taste in their mouth. Clients do not like to be ‘sold’.

Solicitors need to make money, but not at the expense of common decency.

Howard Shelley, Bilston, West Midlands