Roger Smith is bemused by the government’s inability to do basic maths
Speaking at a Labour party fringe meeting last month Jack Straw was unequivocal: “There are now three times as many lawyers in private practice, but paid for by the taxpayer, as there were three decades ago.” This statistic would be a startling revelation of how lawyers have benefited from legal aid but it seems incapable of proof and highly unlikely to be true.
Thirty years ago, legal aid statistics for the Crown Court were not co-ordinated with those for other cases. This makes it impossible to know how many lawyers in total were working in legal aid. Furthermore, statistics were never kept for the number of solicitors in receipt of legal aid. The unit of account was the solicitor’s offices to whom cheques were sent. We know that about 4,000 barristers received a cheque and 8,241 solicitors’ offices for non-Crown Court work in 1977–78. Alas, the Legal Services Commission now fills its annual reports with management tosh that does not reveal many useful statistics.
However, we can calculate from the scant information
