A career at the Bar will “become a pastime for the rich” and out of the reach of students from poorer backgrounds because of the Government’s legal aid reforms, the leader of Britain’s junior barristers warned today.
Hannah Kinch, head of the Young Barristers’ Committee, said cuts in fees for criminal cases and other planned changes would make it impossible for graduates to pay back the costs of their training unless they had financial support from their parents.
She said that improvements in social mobility and ethnic and gender diversity would “go out of the window” as a result, “killing off” the profession at its roots as potential applicants and current young barristers turned to other more lucrative careers.
Ms Kinch’s warning follows the submission of a highly-critical response by the Young Barristers’ Committee to a Government consultation on its planned legal aid changes.
The reforms, put forward by Justice Secretary Chris Grayling, are designed to save £220 million a year by introducing price-competitive tendering to provide legal aid in criminal cases, cutting lawyers’ fees and making prisoners and some migrants ineligible for taxpayers’ support.
Ms Kinch, from London’s 23 Essex Street chambers, claimed that daily earnings for junior barristers were already as low as £50 a day and further fee cuts of up to 30 per cent would make the career unaffordable for many. “The Bar is going to become a pastime for the rich,” she said. “If you are coming in with debts of £60,000 from university and Bar training you are not going to survive for long earning a few hundred pounds a week. Only people who have private means will be able to afford it.”
She said diversity would also be hit because women and ethnic minority lawyers were often employed in criminal law and other areas of
publicly-funded work, and added: “There has been huge progress in the last 20 years on ethnic diversity and gender, but that’s all going to go out of the window.”
The submission from the Young Barristers’ Committee to Mr Grayling also warns the reforms will have a “disproportionately detrimental effect on those from lower socio-economic backgrounds” and will make it “financially unviable” to work in criminal law.
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The document adds: “Many junior barristers are already finding that they simply cannot afford to pay to get to court, or pay their rent. These proposals will kill off the profession from the roots up.”
Mr Grayling’s plans have attracted almost universal opposition from the legal profession, but he has responded by accusing lawyers of making “over the top” claims about the impact of the changes. He insists economies are needed to reverse years of rising legal aid bills.
