MOST of you, I’m sure, won’t have waded through the pages of submissions to the Legal Aid Review Panel, which is re-examining the case for reforming the way Islanders get access to justice regardless of means.

It’s a contentious area, really rather important, pretty impenetrable and garnished with pious claptrap from the legal profession. Perhaps you’d let me explain…

While it’s never put in these terms, legal aid is basically a discussion of how much people should be allowed to earn at the expense of others. Last time I checked, senior partners in Guernsey were on up to £900,000 a year. Yours would be on more since their charges are higher.

But these islands are business-facing, fans of light-touch regulation and generally believe competition is the best way of ensuring consumers get value for money in goods and services.

At the same time, there have never been so many advocates, barristers, solicitors and paralegals in these islands. Yet at the same time, fees and charges have never been higher – up to £625 an hour according to a 2015 JEP page-one splash, based on a consultant’s report.

To some extent, perhaps we should be saying, ‘fair play to them’. If you can command such income, why not? It beats being a hedge fund manager or investment banker I suppose.

The problem starts when the service provided – like that of doctors or medical specialists – is so crucial to someone’s wellbeing that the state feels it has to step in to ensure access irrespective of income or wealth.

Personally, I’d include plumbers, electricians, builders, car mechanics and dentists but looking at how John McDonnell wants to nationalise virtually everything when/if Labour gets in, maybe that’s not so fanciful.

Anyway, where the piety enters is via the Law Society of Jersey’s submission that: ‘The availability of Legal Aid is, in our view, critical to the smooth operation of Jersey’s justice system, ensuring that [those] who truly cannot afford the cost of legal advice and representation are not deprived of access to justice.’

Which is why the lawyers want the taxpayer to fund the system, instead of them continuing to do it out of a sense of civic duty and in recognition of their film star wages. Oh, and they want to drop the eligibility criteria to £35,000.

That’s potentially per household or couple (although you can get help with university fees up to £100,000) so you can see at a glance that ‘access to justice’ is denied, or at least made very burdensome, to most people in Jersey unless mega-wealthy.

The key to this is the Law Society’s very telling phrase, ‘…ensuring that [those] who truly cannot afford…’ are not excluded from seeing a lawyer.

In other words, the desire by lawyers to charge like a wounded bull is so strong that ‘aid’ is to be made available solely to those effectively on minimum wage AND (if you look at the joyless application form) who have no other assets. Indeed, one of the questions is: ‘Do you have any cash over £300?’

To a degree, I have sympathy for the legal profession. Jersey is the only jurisdiction where an estimated £9m-worth of aid a year is provided by the practitioners themselves.

Even Guernsey accepted back in 1995 that there was a human rights obligation to provide a statutory legal aid system funded by the States, albeit only after a successful challenge at Strasbourg.

Jersey, meanwhile, relies on something put in place in 1771 and maintained largely by the lawyers themselves.

Guernsey’s legal aid bill last year was a shade under £2.5m, nearly 25 per cent higher than the year before, and a significant chunk of Employment and Social Security’s budget. Which is why there’s pressure to reduce it, not least because the bulk of it goes on civil matters.

This is why I said at the outset that reviewing legal aid is basically the same as asking how much someone can charge for a vital service.

Much of what the courts deal with now is marriage or partnership break-ups and, distressingly, that too frequently involves allegations that the (usually male) other half abused the kids in some way.

In Guernsey at least, the belief is that the family courts generally side with women and, as there’s complete secrecy on proceedings, no way of knowing whether that’s true or not.

What is accepted, however, is that there are many embittered husbands, convinced the system was rigged against them and that they couldn’t afford the legal representation they needed to fight made-up allegations.

Those allegations, incidentally, are frequently made as a matter of course to secure a better settlement at the husband’s expense, to gain custody of the children or to reduce access to them. It can be a bitter and savage process.

I take no sides in this but the number of people I’ve spoken to suggest there’s at least something in the concerns expressed.

The point, however, is how you ensure, in the words of the original lawyer’s oath, that ‘widows, the poor, orphans, and undefended persons’ get the legal assistance they require.

Reducing the income barrier as proposed to £35,000 effectively helps no one but the legal profession.