Brother, can you spare a quid? — But it’s not all bad at the Criminal Bar!

Some controversy has been engaged over the high sums paid to barristers who receive legal aid payments for their criminal work. At the top of the list is a Birmingham barrister Balbir Singh, head of Equity Chambers. He has earned around £1m per annum for the past two years, coming ahead of a number of QCs. It is worth considering Mr Singh’s treatment in the media before passing on to some more general treatments of legal aid provision in this country. Reporting Mr Singh’s earnings last year from legal aid, several newspaper reports seem slightly surprised that he should have earned so much without being a QC and that his earnings from public funds should have exceeded those of the nine silks in the top ten highest paid barristers for the year ending 31 March 2007. This just goes to show that a senior junior may often do as well financially as a QC and one can only ask if he would have earned as much had he taken silk. John C Rees QC, second in the list, took home fees of £956,000, just £10,000 lest than Balbir Singh.

His own biography on the Equity Chambers website says that his is a former magistrates clerk but if there is anything snobbish in this suggestion, we are further told in one report (The Telegraph 27 July 2007) that Balbir Singh was accused of impropriety in a television programme, The Cook Report, some ten years beforehand. He was subsequently acquitted by a Bar Council disciplinary tribunal of telling a client to concoct an alibi and to destroy evidence, the tribunal saying of the television trial by media that its evidence was inconsistent, unreliable and not credible. Some 60 judges and QCs came to Mr Singh’s aid and, ironically, his career seems to have blossomed afterwards. Was there a slight snigger as the report announced the results of his success over the nine silks by saying that he ‘has never been promoted to the rank of QC’ — perhaps he has never thought it desirable. If so, one can hardly blame him for not seeking preferment.

Clare Dyer in a report in The Guardian referred to Mr Singh’s having gone to a grammar school and then Walsall College before attending Coventry Polytechnic. One would have thought that these were great reasons to praise the Bar’s diversity as a career open to talents. There is, however, the slightest suggestion of wondering what Mr Singh who comes deep from the Brummie hinterland, should be doing as the fattest of fat cats.

 Before we all wonder what these highly paid defence counsel do with all their money, we are reassured by the Minstry of Justice that the figures now revealed may refer to sums earned over a number of years. Slow payers at the Legal Services Commission, eh? Moreover, they include VAT, so let’s deduct 17.5% for a start, and the barristers have to pay disbursements for travel and professional expenses to their chambers. Perhaps that’s a further 30%. But when you are ready to reach for your handkerchief to wipe away a tear of sympathy, they also have to pay tax and national insurance. Good heavens, don’t the rest of us? Perhaps even some horrendous self-employed pension contributions as well. Either they’re over-paid or not and it’s strange to see the Ministry of Justice trying to make excuses.

Looking at the comparatively paltry sums paid in civil legal aid to practitioners — generally under half a million pounds annually, one realizes, if one hasn’t quite read the caveat, that Criminal Defence Service Legal Aid isn’t the only source of income for the top criminal barristers: there’s private work as well! That should stop the top ten CDS barristers, earning from £663,000 to £957,000, from sinking much below the half a million a year net breadline.

It all gave Labour MP Andrew ‘Dismal’ Dismore the chance to lay into ‘bewigged fat cats’ while legal aid centres were starved of funds to do the bread-and butter work. Tuckers, the highest paid solicitors in 2007, received £8.5, from the Criminal Defence Service but a spokesman wailed, that we ‘lost money undertaking general crime work in the last financial year’. But the Legal Services Commission has now announced that after it had spent in 2007 £1.2 billion for criminal cases and £620 million for civil cases, that if there was jam today there was to be no jam tomorrow. Cuts would soon reduce the £1m a year criminal barristers to their knees.

The Ministry of Justice reported

At £38 per head of population, we spend more on legal aid in England and Wales than in any other country. This figure compares to between £3 and £4 per head in France and Germany, and around £8 per head in New Zealand and the Republic of Ireland -both countries with similar legal systems to ours. The £2 billion we spend each year is around the same as what we spend running our prisons.

 

Speaking of recent rises which will be stopped once the Carter reforms are put in place, the Ministry added,

Legal aid has been one of the fastest growing parts of the public sector over the past 25 years, with spending growing from £522m in 1982 – in today’s prices – to around £2 billion now: a real terms increase of approximately 5.7% per annum.

 

That doesn’t seem as bad as it might have been considering inflation generally but the comparative figures do pose questions. Why do we spend so much? And why does the junior end of the Criminal Bar picture itself as living on the brink of ruin? Is this true or is it that the Bar, like farmers, permanently moan about hard times? I think that it was Lord Woolf who complained a few year ago that some members of commercial chambers of a mere five or so years call were earning more than he was as a Law Lord. What really is the financial picture for the Bar? The work seems to be there and the profession increases apace. No one would say that judicial salaries in the High Court, the Court of Appeal, and the House of Lords are outrageously high but what of the generality of the Bar itself, which still continues to be the main provider of senior judicial candidates?

Anyway, back to the successful Mr Singh. Apparently Balbir Singh is fluent in Hindi, Punjabi and Urdu. I’m not sure what that contributes to his success as I’ve never viewed the Asian community in general as particularly criminal. But personally I congratulate his success and, my appalling linguistic skills notwithstanding, I wonder what ‘Teach Yourself …’ book I should be reading and practising. For now I’ll stick to Gaelic — Slainte! 

Richard