The Bar Council and Criminal Bar Association have called for referral fees to be abolished.
The two organisations made a joint response to the Legal Services Board’s discussion document on referral fees, referral arrangements and fee sharing.
According to their statement, referral fees “represent an unwarranted and unjustifiable threat to the public interest in the efficient and effective provision of legal services to consumers”, and attempts to regulate referral fees have “failed”.
“Individuals will be represented on the basis of the financial interests of those party to the payment, the details of referral fees will remain unexposed, costs will almost certainly increase, any such increase will be passed on to the public, and the field of providers of legal services may well be reduced,” it says.
“All of this is likely to occur without any increase in the quality of representation.”
They warn there can be no “halfway house compromise” in relation to advocacy.
Nicholas Green QC, immediate past chairman of the Bar Council, says: “It is plainly not in the public interest to maintain a system of referral fees and in fact they represent
