Bar weighs option of breaking up barristers' training

Training for prospective barristers may be broken up following "concerns" that increasing training costs has a "significant influence on the range of people considering a career at the Bar", the Bar Standards Board has said.

Breaking up the one-year Bar Professional Training Course - which budding barristers undertake at a cost of between £12,000 and £18,000 - is part of a range of options being considered by the legal regulator.

About 1,700 students take the Bar course every year but only 455 people are offered much coveted pupillages - the final stage of training before becoming a barrister.

Alistair MacDonald QC, chairman of the Bar Council, told the Financial Times that if the BPTC were to be broken up, this could help improve diversity and equality in the profession - which in the past has been accused of being dominated by white, middle-class males - because less well-off students are often deterred by the "financial risk of the current model".

"There are too many people spending too much money in order to train . . . with no realistic prospect of being able to make a start in the profession," Mr MacDonald said.

Splitting up the postgraduate BPTC course - proposed in a consultation paper due out soon - will enable the first and cheaper part to be conducted online, leaving only the most talented to go through to the second stage.

For those who complete the pupillage there are even fewer tenancies - permanent places in a barristers' chambers - with pay for a criminal barrister starting at as little as £10,000 a year.

Despite this fierce competition, more than 3,000 newly trained barristers are chasing pupillages each year. They have a five-year window after completing the Bar course in which to obtain the pupillage. Most of the country's 15,585 barristers are self-employed and band together into sets of chambers to share administrative overheads.

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The future of the legal profession is one area Mr MacDonald is grappling with in his new role as chairman of the Bar Council, which represents barristers. Mr MacDonald is the first former leader of a circuit (the judicial territory over which a court has the jurisdiction to hear cases) outside London to lead the Bar for 12 years. He was educated at Wigan grammar school in Lancashire and worked as a biochemist before retraining as a barrister.

Mr MacDonald, who practises in Leeds, took over as chairman at the end of a turbulent year that saw barristers stage direct action in the form of a "mass non-attendance" for the first time in their history over cuts to the legal aid system imposed by the government under its austerity programme.

The protests came in response to plans by the Ministry of Justice to cut publicly funded fee rates by up to 30 per cent. The Criminal Bar Association said the government's proposed cuts followed 40 per cent cuts already applied since 1997.

The ministry revised its proposals last May when a deal was struck with the Bar and there has been ongoing dialogue since.

"I would be concerned if after May there is a threat to cut criminal legal aid fees further [that] all the goodwill and calm discussion we've had over the past six to nine months. It'll all get back to direct action," Mr MacDonald said.

The impact of the legal aid cuts have hit the family courts particularly hard with a reduction in parties represented by barristers. There has also been a drop in the numbers of family court cases going to mediation because lawyers are often the ones referring cases to mediation if the case has a chance of being settling.

"More cases are fighting rather than settling and so the worry I have is not only for the parents the litigation is affecting but the children, instead of the heat being taken out of cases by third-party professionals," Mr MacDonald said.

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