Hugh Barrett’s reply to John Ford’s concerns about the allocation of low-volume category legal services is inadequate. Mr Barrett’s letter explains that in most low-volume categories, the tender process was ‘non-competitive with matter starts awarded to all organisations that met our essential criteria’. However, the problem is that the essential criteria were set at such a low level.

In particular peer review scores, success rates and any other measure of quality (and therefore value for money) have been ignored in the tender process. The result has been a free-for-all, in which providers without any experience of these low-volume (that is, highly specialised) areas of law have been placed on an equal footing with highly experienced practitioners like John Ford.

Before writing this letter, I Googled Mr Barrett and the first result that popped up is one where he explains that his approach to public sector procurement is ‘...from a perspective that includes many years of involvement in private sector procurement; I've bought everything from industrial gloves to aeroplanes’. Well, we are not rubber gloves and our clients are not Ryanair passengers – they are vulnerable people for whom accessing good quality legal aid advice is about to get even more difficult.

Gareth Mitchell , Pierce Glynn, London