Does a free legal service get in the way of earning lots?

One of my favourites in this respect, and it must be 30 years at least since I first heard the late Vernon Tomes tell it, concerns the £50 note in the Royal Square and the question as to who pocketed it – Father Christmas, a rich Jersey lawyer or a poor Jersey lawyer. The answer, of course, is the rich Jersey lawyer because both Father Christmas and a poor Jersey lawyer are figments of the imagination.

It won’t come as any surprise to The Reader when I say that another I like – and again first heard by me when uttered by Vernon Tomes – was his version (and I know there are many others) of the three great lies; I’ll love you just as much in the morning, there’s a cheque in the post and I’m from the States, I’m here to help you.

As to the one about the lawyers, my amusement was rekindled when I read last week that the legal profession is again questioning whether it should continue to provide legal aid as a free service to those who need the services of a lawyer and particularly those facing criminal charges.

According to the profession’s shop steward – Law Society chief executive Neville Benbow – individual lawyers must serve on a rota providing free legal aid for 15 years after qualifying and, given that the system’s been in place for almost 250 years, ‘it’s time for a change’.

While I don’t for a moment doubt his sincerity, the fact of the matter is that Mr Benbow is presumably paid to say what he does and he quite rightly points out that the legal aid demands on the profession he represents have indeed increased considerably.

However, even the most ardent supporter of the view he and, presumably, a majority of lawyers take would find it difficult to argue with the contention that while those legal aid obligations have increased, the general level of remuneration enjoyed by the profession has also increased considerably.

Indeed, if some of the figures bandied about, and even by those one would expect to know about these things, were halved, the amounts I’ve heard seem to me to be as close to winning the lottery as it’s possible to get.

The other thing Mr Benbow might like to know is that there was a time, and it’s not that long ago – a generation and a bit, perhaps – when far from moaning about the amount of unpaid work legal aid involved them in, more than a few advocates could be seen heading towards what was then the Police Court in Seale Street just before ten in the morning (and particularly Mondays when those locked up over the weekend would be making their first appearances) on the off chance that they might pick up a couple of cases.

As one of them once put it to my cousin who used to be in the police, ‘the Evening Post reporter writes about every case so it’s always a nice bit of free advertising whenever I get my name mentioned and that brings in the paying clients’.

Perhaps there might well be more than the proverbial grain of truth in the suggestion that the real reason some lawyers object to providing a free legal aid service is that it gets in the way of making a fortune.

As to the involvement of that lot in the Big House in the suggestion that the biscuit tin under Chancellor Philip Ozouf’s bed be prised open and £3 million a year be given to lawyers to compensate them for giving free legal aid, this bolshie little crapaud would urge his elected representatives to be very wary indeed of such a suggestion.

Experience shows, and not necessarily experience involving the legal profession, I stress, that what we are told will cost £3 million a year will indeed cost that – but only in the first year. Thereafter, once the principle of payment has been established, the cost will escalate considerably and it won’t be that many years before long suffering taxpayers are shelling out perhaps £10 million a year.

I can’t say that I view all this with the same sort of distaste with which I view millions in public money being used to promote a finance industry which can (a) well afford to pay for its own promotion and (b) has become a keyword for greed and the sort of sharp practices which would put the used car salesmen and estate agents of yesteryear to shame, but without any other contenders in the frame it comes in a pretty close second.

And finally,

As I have mentioned before, and in common with an increasing number of our generation and older, Herself and I are travelling on buses far more frequently these days, thanks in part fellow taxpayers who subsidise our travel and to three people who are sadly no longer with us – Dick Shenton, Mike Wavell and Bob Lewis who used to run what was the JMT. I have a feeling that it was as a result of those three getting together that the current pensioners concessionary travel scheme was introduced, although someone will no doubt correct me if I’m wrong.

While it might be argued that free fares for pensioners costs the Island money, I would contend that the economy benefits much more by allowing let’s say a hundred couples to go to town on ten different bus routes for nothing than it would by having those people travel in 50 different vehicles and clogging up the roads. That’s why the experimental park and ride from St John is such a good idea.