Bar Council backs criminal barristers planning to strike

The Bar Council has come out in support of criminal barristers’ protests for a properly funded criminal justice system, which include plans for strike action.

The Bar Council’s chair, Andrew Walker QC, and vice chair, Richard Atkins QC, released a joint statement that starkly assessed the government’s mismanagement of the justice system last week. They said: “The Ministry of Justice (MoJ) budget has been slashed across the board in the last decade. The effects, in every area, are becoming ever clearer: courts and prisons in a deplorable state of repair, leading to unacceptable conditions; litigants struggling to deal with their own cases without legal help in the most trying of circumstances; overloaded courts and judges; increasing delays; and judicial morale at rock bottom, to name but a few. Previous programmes of reform have failed to produce the intended benefits through a lack of funding and political will. While the current investment in the court reform programme is substantial, it cannot hope to reverse all of the harm that has already been done, and continues to be done.”

Legal aid funding has been subjected to a series of swingeing cuts since 2007 and criminal barristers’ fees have decreased by some 40% in real terms since that date. The Bar Council is just one of many legal organisations to point out that the policies of David Cameron’s and Theresa May’s successive governments have hurt barristers, but also vulnerable people on low incomes, victims of crime and witnesses of crime.

The statement expressed the Bar Council’s solidarity with increasingly desperate barristers planning to stage a mass walk-out: “The system staggers on only through the dedication, commitment, resilience and goodwill of the criminal Bar. If the criminal Bar feels that this situation cannot continue, that is hardly surprising. The low level of morale was revealed in a recent Bar Council survey. More than a third of those criminal barristers who responded were dissatisfied with their careers and either considering alternatives or planning to leave the criminal Bar soon. That was more than double the rate reported in other areas of practice, with the main reasons given (both in private practice and in the Crown Prosecution Service) being poor income and work-life balance. If criminal barristers choose individually to take action to make their feelings clear to those in government who hold the purse-strings, while remaining true to the ethos of our profession, then we believe that they will have the support of their colleagues across the Bar.”