Anyone who has followed the saga of the LSC/LAA’s failed, vanity project – the Public Defender Service – will find nothing at all surprising in this latest chapter.
The original pilot has staggered on in a few locations where luck, rank opportunism and worse has saved it from competition by local solicitors. It received protected species status in the last bid round.
It has never properly been evaluated, particularly against the most important criterion of our time, value for money. Any attempt to achieve reasonable scrutiny as to how hardworking families taxes are being spent on the entity, have been consistently rebuffed.
The recent expansion has been a vain, last minute attempt to derail the collective action of solicitors and the bar, exemplified by PDS Silks taking on “junior” trials to break the “ no returns” action.
The MoJ statement, that this involves “no additional cost to the taxpayer” seems to confirm this assessment and raises the obvious question; so they had nothing better to be getting on with then?
UPDATE
Today it is announced that the PDS is recruiting in their protected reserves.
The justification “to provide a critical safeguard against market failure across England and Wales” is laughable, even by MoJ spinning standards.
The salaries on offer, though pretty good, also give the lie to their preposterous “fat cat legal aid lawyer” slight too.
