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QCs should take a huge pay cut, says Law Society

Robert Verkaik,Legal Affairs Correspondent
Monday 04 October 1999 23:00 BST

TOP CRIMINAL barristers should take a pay cut of £200,000 so that they earn no more than the highest earning hospital consultants, the Law Society will argue today.

TOP CRIMINAL barristers should take a pay cut of £200,000 so that they earn no more than the highest earning hospital consultants, the Law Society will argue today.

The proposal is part of the Law Society's call for a ceiling on Queen's Counsel fees paid out of the public purse for criminal work.

While leading barristers earn up to £300,000 in criminal legal aid a year, the highest paid hospital consultants receive no more than £120,000 from the National Health Service.

The Law Society said that QCs' fees in high cost criminal cases should be "strictly monitored and paid at a rate that is reasonable and justifiable". For the first time the Lord Chancellor, Lord Irvine of Lairg, last year named the top-earning QCs paid from the legal aid budget. The highest earning criminal practitioners were found to receive £300,000.

The Law Society president Robert Sayer said: "We are calling for a rate that is comparable with that of senior public posts, notably those equivalent to NHS consultants."

He added: "We cannot go on with a system that uses the public's money to pay inflated prices, simply because of title."

The Law Society proposal forms part of its response to the Legal Aid Board's (LAB) consultation paper on controlling fees in high cost criminal cases.

Under the LAB recommendations, barristers and solicitors bills in serious fraud cases would be substantially cut back. Barristers would be paid at hourly rates and the amount would be pegged to the pay ofdistrict judges. Teams of lawyers would have to produce up-to-date assessments of how much each case would cost.

The focus on high cost crime trials follows a number of high-profile fraud cases. The most costly case to date was the Serious Fraud Office's prosecution of the Maxwell brothers which cost £15.9m in legal aid. Between 1992/3 and 1997/8 spending in the higher criminal courts rose from £221m to £349m while the number of cases remained constant.

The Bar Council said it had been leading the way in finding a system of "fixed cost contracts". But a Bar spokesman said comparisons with doctors' pay were misleading. "What we should do is negotiate the right fee which is reasonable to the tax-payer but gets someone who can handle the case."

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