• 09 September 2010
•  on twitter
•  News Webfeed
•  Events Webfeed
• Breaking news & events:

Say No to BVT

The effects of BVT will be:

• No contract no own client work
• Massive reduction of firms in London
• Online price auction for all 33 schemes in London
• Reduction in quality of representation
• Devastating effect on criminal justice system
• Attacks own client choice

• Complexity. Auctioning Duty Solicitor slots through constructing artificial blocks of work is an unnecessary complexity. The present system of allocation is well understood, reflects local differences of supply and provides national coverage.
• Auctioning simultaneously Duty Slots for an entire Criminal Justice area like London means Firms may be engaged in up to 32 auctions simultaneously on line. This is an absurd process.
• The process assumes management skills and the ability to model outcomes based on many variables using data that Firms do not have.
• The process assumes Firms will plan a price for the work. This is an enormous and erroneous assumption. The alternative proposition is likely to be true, namely, that Firms react to a price set by changing the business model.
• The business model will change by deskilling, reduction in employment rights and micro sizing. The Labour Government will introduce a degree of gang mastering into publically procured services and the most likely outcome is an ever greater fragmentation of supplier base.
• The market is sophisticated. It has arisen over sixty years of Legal Aid and is the product of an enormous amount of sophisticated risk taking by Solicitors providing their own capital who set up to meet client needs.
• Solicitors identify client need through local knowledge. Firms are not where they are as a matter of whim but because this is how the market has evolved.
• It is a market that meets need and this include niche practices serving national groups and Solicitors meeting particular needs with expertise and skills in particular groups like travellers or animal rights or green activists and so on. That the market is structured in this way is a huge public good.
• Restructuring it through BVT is forcing one size fits all type solutions onto the sophisticated market and therefore losing a huge amount of the public good which is embodied in the present arrangements.
• BVT was overwhelmingly rejected by the supplier base. To continue with it in the face of overwhelming rejection and hostility is enormously damaging to the relationship between the supplier base, the LSC and the MOJ.
• The budget is not the problem. There is no evidence now produced to say that the current criminal budget is not sustainable. If there is evidence publish it.
• The Government and LSC have moved the goalposts by now claiming that the purpose of cuts is to rebalance the budget from crime to social welfare law. No figures are supplied as to what is the objective in the transfer of money.
• The argument that social welfare law is underfunded is disingenuous. The Government is in fact buying through fixed fee systems for example in Welfare Benefit, masses of cases which can only be described as junk. They are poor value for the tax payer. They are bought so that the Government can claim that year on year more acts of assistance are delivered regardless of the quality.
• Fixed fees inevitably cause a fall in quality. This may be less time spent in the Police Station and less time spent preparing serious cases. The problem of the supplier carrying all the risk drives suppliers, across the whole supplier base, to seek safe economic outcomes by spending as little time as possible on a case.
• Quality is falling. There is no way that the audit processes will ever detect or catch up with a mass fall of quality.
• This is extremely serious for courts as the quality of information available to a court in the adversarial process will fall making unjust outcomes more likely.
• Client choice. Contradictory statements are made in the consultation document about client choice. There is absolutely no reason why the current arrangement should not remain in place, namely that publically funded work can be done by any Solicitor holding a contract in any Police Station. It is a matter of Judgment for each Firm about the economics of any particular attendance. This maintains client choice and continuity between cases.
• Even positing the idea that there should be a dramatic cut in scope by the removal of face to face Police Station advice for all cases except the most grave or those involving the vulnerable or mentally ill is outrageous. This is turning the clock back to pre 1984 and providing a licence for police mal practice.
• The presence of Solicitors in the Police Station protects the integrity of evidence gathering by Police. It is vital that the first steps in any investigation have integrity otherwise the course of entire cases becomes tainted with all the subsequent consequences for justice and in cost terms.
• Outcome. What outcome is sought by the LSC is completely obscure. The LSC want neither large Firms nor fragmentation and it maybe that a final outcome of a process would be a very similar distribution of Firms as now, although it is equally possible there may be a huge reduction in supply. This is experimenting and risk taking on a breathtaking scale which is not founded on any articulated view of cost saving. It involves practitioners in an enormous and ridiculous waste of time and is an even greater example of bureaucratic folly than the VHCC contracting scheme.

We have even drafted a response that you may wish to adopt.  Download it here.