Editorial: Legal aid in the dock

OPINION: Dame Margaret Bazley's review of the legal aid system is as damning as it is alarming.

Her review was aimed at identifying ways the system could be better structured to get a better result for the people it helps and provide a sustainable, value for money service at the same time.

The starting point of any review always has to be working out whether the system is working or not. Dame Margaret has discovered a system that is badly off track.

She visited every large court in the country, as well as provincial and smaller courts in preparing her 117-page report. She met with lawyers, judges, court staff, prosecutors and community law centres. She found system-wide failings, a system that is open to abuse by a "small but significant number" of corrupt lawyers and defendants and examples of appalling behaviour.

The two organisations at the centre of the system, the Legal Services Agency (LSA) and the Law Society, come in for particularly harsh criticism.

She found the LSA, which is a Government bureaucracy, is paralysed by a difficult relationship with the Law Society which means control of the system is wielded by the lawyers, and not the LSA.

It looks like a case of the tail wagging the dog. Lawyers dominate the system while the agency charged with getting a good deal for the taxpayer rolls over and plays dead. The LSA has tried to hold poor performers to account but could not because of the way the system is structured.

The real test for the legal profession now is how it responds to Dame Margaret's report.

It could go one of two ways. Either the profession resorts to type and lives up to its self-protective reputation by attacking Dame Margaret's findings, or it puts its hands up and acknowledges that it needs to change.

The LSA clearly needs a massive structural change and should be folded into the Ministry of Justice as Dame Margaret suggests. This would give it more clout and administrative backbone to swing the balance away from the profession and more towards the consumer and, ultimately, deliver value for money for the taxpayer.

If the Law Society is serious about reform it also needs to root out its corrupt members and bring them to justice.The society has the reputation of being a ferocious advocate for its members and overseeing an opaque complaints system that stacks the odds in its members' favour, rather than that of the consumer.

Dame Margaret's report has exposed the profession's underbelly. This should not come as news – every profession has its rotten apples.

The report gives the profession a chance to clear the slate. A genuinely positive response – rather than a defensive one – will go a long way towards restoring faith in the system.