New chair Andrew Walker QC discusses his ambitious agenda for change
The Bar will need to find new markets and opportunities post-Brexit, Bar Chairman-elect Andrew Walker QC has said in his inaugural speech.
Outlining his priorities for 2018, Walker said the Bar Council ‘must work with the government to identify where they can help in opening up new markets after Brexit’, as well as do all it can to salvage those parts of the EU justice arrangements that have benefited citizens and the Bar.
Offering some optimism on access to justice, he said: ‘We may be at a turning point in political will and mood, even if only a minor one, on some modest changes to LASPO (the Legal Aid, Sentencing and Punishment of Offenders Act 2012).’ £0.5bn more than intended was saved as a result of LASPO, he said, and ‘it is inexplicable that the government has failed to take any account of both the evidence and the sheer logic that for every £1 spent on legal aid, far more is saved elsewhere.’
The Bar Council will also press the government to end cross-examination of those giving evidence of abuse or violence in family proceedings by the individual alleged to have abused them.
Walker highlighted the higher debts and housing costs faced by new practitioners along with lower fixed fees, particularly in criminal work, and higher workloads in publicly funded cases.
‘We are being asked to do more work than ever to prepare for hearings, and during hearings; and we must also bear the brunt of the added difficulties presented and experienced by litigants in person, often in very stressful circumstances, and – in family cases – by the added strains on local authority budgets.’ He said barristers have sometimes worked for days but been paid only for a fraction of their time.
