Barristers' anger as CPS prefers cut-price solicitors

Timothy Dutton QC sounded pretty bullish as he delivered his inaugural address to the Bar Council. When he joined the profession in 1979, there were around 5000 barristers. Now, there are 15,000 - all but 3500 of them practising individually as self-employed consultants.

Like actors, practising barristers are notoriously anxious about where the next engagement will come from. Most will be reassured to hear their new leader playing down his reference to under-employment. "I think the Bar is in a healthy position," Dutton tells me. "The civil side of the Bar is thriving."

Indeed so. "Work comes in different ways these days but - touch wood - we have plenty of it," says Julia Hornor of Blackstone Chambers. "The juniors here are very busy and some of our Silks are almost completely booked up to Easter," adds Michael Kaplan of 4-5 Gray's Inn Square.

Some of that may result from the current credit squeeze. "When the economy shifts in the way it has done," Dutton explains, "work on the civil side increases. There is much greater regulatory activity and there are more defaults."

But things are very different at the Criminal Bar. Prosecutors are losing work to in-house advocates at the Crown Prosecution Service. Defence counsel watch the bread being taken from their mouths by solicitor-advocates.

And, most alarming of all, if clause 86 of the Criminal Justice and Immigration Bill is approved by Parliament then cases will be conducted in magistrates' court by CPS staff who are not legally qualified at all.

That is not in the public interest, the new Bar chairman says. Trying to put a brave face on inroads into his members' earnings, he stresses that the Bar "is still doing 89%, by value, of prosecution work".

But barristers who act mainly for defendants are very gloomy. "It's awful," says Colin Cook, senior clerk at Garden Court Chambers. "The general public don't even know what's going on. And it's going to get worse."

He complains that the CPS is doing more work in-house to meet its financial targets. "They're recruiting would-be lawyers who couldn't make it at the Bar," Cook says bluntly.

Defence solicitors have also been recruiting their own advocates, taking work that would previously have been done by his chambers.

Cook says some solicitor-advocates are simply not up to the job: "They act as 'straw juniors' in large, complex cases when they have neither the skill, the experience nor the expertise to assist or take over the case if the leader is absent."

He estimates that his members' earnings are 15% lower than a year ago, and predicts they will be down by as much as 30% in a year or two.

"We have seen a substantial falling away," he continues. "I have to work harder than I have ever had to in order to find new work. Juniors in all sets of chambers are now suffering."

Sally O'Neill QC, chairman of the Criminal Bar Association, confirms the reduction in the work available to the independent criminal bar over the past two years.

"We are not concerned by competition from those who wish to carry out their own advocacy from within either a solicitors' firm or the CPS," she says. "What we are concerned about, however, is that the high standards set by the independent Bar are also insisted upon for all those carrying out the duties of an advocate in the Crown Court."

But who cares about standards when you can cut costs by putting experienced barristers out of work?