Solicitors could be forced out of prison law as LSC wields axe

Solicitors have warned that they could be forced to withdraw from prison law and vulnerable clients could be left unrepresented after the LSC announced a budget cap and cuts in fees.

Simon Creighton, partner at Bhatt Murphy in London, said the measures would reduce legal aid payments to firms by a third, meaning that the work would have to be done by paralegals or legal executives.

'They are abolishing London weighting and incorporating travel claims into the standard fee,' he said,

'This puts us in the ridiculous position where we will be not paid for maintaining an office in London or for working outside and travelling in.'

Creighton said the hourly rates for prison law work had been frozen for the past eight years and were already the lowest in the system.

'The root of the problem is not the lawyers, but the government's penal policies,' he said. 'The prison population has risen in the last ten years from around 60,000 to 80,000, with the biggest increase in those given indeterminate sentences.'

Creighton said that the prisoners given indeterminate sentences for public protection (IPP sentences) had trebled in the last ten years and they could only be released following a parole hearing with a lawyer.

Rosemary Bowling, solicitor in the prison law department of Tuckers, said the creation of thousands of new offences, the highest ever number of prisoners and the cuts in the prison budget all had to be taken into account.

'In this context there can be no justification in the proposed caps to the legal aid budget for prison law,' she said. 'Prisoners need access to legal advice and assistance more than ever and the proposed cuts will mean that some of the most vulnerable members of society will have to go without.'

Carolyn Regan, chief executive of the Legal Services Commission, said the annual budget for prison law cases would be capped at the current level of £22 million, to stop it rising to £44 million by 2011.

She said the new fixed and standard fee regime would be introduced in July next year, together with a tougher version of the merits test.

In a separate development, Stephen Wooler, the chief inspector of the CPS, has said the organisation was being driven by targets to allocate cases to advocates 'beyond their experience and expertise' in some areas.

He said that a small proportion of CPS advocates were 'less than competent' and a few 'very poor'.

However he said a significant number of advocates, both in-house and external, were 'lacklustre'.

Wooler went on: 'This also covers lack of presence in court and minor issues of competence. Whilst not undermining presentation of the prosecution case as a whole, these seriously affect the perceptions of others about the CPS.'

The chief inspector said that in the magistrates' courts, CPS 'associate prosecutors', formerly known as designated case workers, were well regarded but there were 'significant levels of lacklustre or less than competent advocacy.'

He said these problems were partly due to the speed with which their workload of non-trial cases had expanded.

Meanwhile Wooler blamed some 'strikingly poor case presentation and cross-examination' in magistrate court trials on the movement of skilled prosecutors into the Crown Courts.

'The relationship between cost effectiveness and value for money is also complex; cheapest is not always best,' he said.

'The evidence shows that in a number of certain types of cases (mainly the contested ones) quality has suffered.'

Keir Starmer, the DPP, said he agreed with the chief inspector that the quality of our advocacy, whether provided by in-house advocates or external counsel, should now be a 'primary focus.'