Guest post by Francis FitzGibbon QC: A response to Michael Turner QC on Advocates’ Graduated Fees

Another former Chair of the Criminal Bar Association, Francis FitzGibbon QC, writes in response to this week’s guest post by Michael Turner QC.

 

This is my reply to Michael Turner QC’s post. He doesn’t seem to have read the first ‘Monday Message’ by Chris Henley QC, the current Chair of the Criminal Bar Association.

Dear Mike

Having known you for over 30 years, since I was a pupil and you were a kind and generous junior criminal tenant at Cloisters, I am saddened and angered by your mean-spirited and ill-informed attack in the Secret Barrister’s blog on your successors as Chairs of the Criminal Bar Association. It calls for a public as well as a private reply, so I am going to put this letter in the comments below your post.

You resort to gratuitously and deliberately offensive personal comments: like a bad advocate or a third-rate politician, masking the feebleness of your argument. And you don’t even have the courage to name those who you regard as having failed the profession. ‘Willing to wound but afraid to strike’ sums it up.

On the substance, such as it is, you are perpetuating a false and dangerous ‘stab-in-the back’ narrative. The Bar leadership achieved genuine progress in the drawn-out AGFS negotiations. For all your fighting talk at the time, by how much were legal aid fees increased when you were Chair of the CBA in 2012-13?

You complain that there was no judicial review of the AGFS proposals: what decision or action by MOJ do you regard as being so flawed that a JR would have been feasible, let alone successful? I don’t see how an increase in the budget, following years of negotiation and an agreement, could be susceptible to judicial review. Have you considered the costs implications for the CBA and its members?

There was no question of the Bar taking an unfair advantage over the solicitors: remember that HCAs will benefit from the increased fees and their firms still retain the benefit of claiming litigator and advocacy fees for the same case.  If this is your attempt to curry favour – good luck.  Their battle with MOJ was different from ours. They were faced with an actual cut – we had a redistribution of a stable budget to negotiate, and ended up with an increase. The reason for the proposed LGFS cut was that the inflation of PPE claims by reason of increased volumes of ‘pages’, and the Napperdecision, blew a big hole in MOJ’s budget. Very different considerations applied to AGFS, as you should know.  If you can think of a principled basis for continuing to use page counts as a basis for calculating fees, I’d like to know what it is. There is no reason – and you give none – for reading the MOJ’s failures over LGFS across to AGFS. You are too smart to subscribe to infantile conspiracy theories – I hope.

You also need to understand that this was a negotiation – the sort of thing that your models in the trade unions have been doing for decades, in the interests of their members. That means give and take. You may regard compromise as a dirty word, but that’s what responsible people do.

Your apparent prescription – belligerence, divisiveness, sub-Churchillian rhetoric – is ill-suited to such negotiations. The Bar rejected it in a democratic vote – narrowly but nonetheless. The arguments on both sides were exhaustively laid out before a sophisticated electorate. Pragmatism won the day. Demanding the resignation of the current leadership, after the vote and three days into their terms of office, is nothing short of ridiculous.

No one says the settlement is perfect or the last word on the subject. We will see the true impact of the new scheme in the coming months, and we should not prejudge it. Your intervention – nasty, ill-informed, but mercifully short – does nothing to advance the Bar’s cause. And despite your disclaimer, it stinks of sour grapes.

I hope you will think better of what you have written. It is unworthy of you. You risk becoming an embarrassment to yourself.

Yours ever

Francis