The dispute between the Legal Services Commission (providers of what used to be known as Legal Aid) and barristers is fascinating. Read one man’s view of it here.
If you’re several thousand employees, you don’t like your new pay deal, and you go on strike, then few would argue against your right to do so. The right “to freedom of association with others, including the right to form and to join trade unions for the protection of [one's] interests” is even guaranteed by the European Convention of Human Rights. Yet, when the individuals in question are all self-employed, and are dealing with the government as their main customer, this is alleged to breach competition law. I don’t like this. Preventing a profession from campaigning against government practice is not a very laudable use of competition law. It also smacks of vendetta - the argument has to my knowledge never been used against GPs, who are in a similar negotiating position and for whom the BMA campaigns vociferously.
My own view is that the whole chaotic mess shows the government in a very poor light indeed. The disingenuous approach, which may well affect the quality of defence available to those accused of complex crimes, has to be seen against the budget they’re trying to reduce - £105 million. Seem a lot? Not when you consider that this year the Ministry of Justice spent £176 million on a computer system that they then threw in the bin because it was going to cost £900 million-odd more. Quite why barristers are seem as greedy, yet software contractors are always given a blank cheque, is a mystery to me.
actually i don’t think software contractors’ day rates are a million miles from barristers’. (tho i know less of the latter). the comparison could go further - the gp think barristers get a blank cheque, spout a load of gibberish, dress funny and when things go wrong claim it was defintely working when they drafted the skeleton and it’s all your fault for being rubbish when giving evidence. and have you tried switching the judge off and on again? (well maybe one can stretch a point…).
why chuck away legal advice when you have paid £100 million for it? because spending the other £900 million won’t make it do what you need of it.
At my for-the-meantime-secret-yet-currently-useful employer we have a department which sells IR35 insurance to IT contractors, so I’m well aware of what they earn. For many of them it probably is about comparable with your average barrister. I don’t think they’re greedy at all, I just don’t have a handle on how on earth government projects end up costing so many more times than was originally planned. IT projects are a key target, but look at any major public project, the Olympics, Wembley, the naff-looking Scottish Parliament. The reasons for targeting barristers are surely due to their one-man-band easily-bullied status. I think if you told the average guy on the street that the defence costs for all of the major cases in a year were £176M he’d be unsurprised, but if you told him that government routinely spend nine figure sums on abortive projects which don’t deliver anything, he’d be rightly pissed off.