Scores of top-level terror trials as well as the most complex murder and rape cases are at risk of being run by second-rank lawyers after more than 2,000 Queen’s Counsel and junior barristers boycotted new pay rates.

In what is effectively a stand-off over the proposed cuts in fees, only 130 of 2,300 barristers in England and Wales who had been selected to handle the 100 most complex trials a year have signed the contracts.

A furious dispute has now erupted between the profession and the body that runs the £2 billion legal aid scheme, with each side taking counsel’s opinion on whether the law has been broken.

The Bar Council has accused the Legal Services Commission (LSC) of “unacceptable” behaviour and the commission has accused the Bar of bully-boy tactics, saying that junior barristers feel under pressure to decline to sign the new contracts or join the panel that will take the complex cases.

Tim Dutton, QC, chairman of the Bar Council, said: “Individual barristers have told us that they have not signed these contracts for a variety of reasons, not least that the rates on offer mean yet another pay cut of 10 to 15 per cent — and the terms are unacceptable to them.”

As a result, the LSC with the Ministry of Justice has told barristers that the 330 solicitors’ firms that have signed up to the panel to do the complex cases will be allowed to instruct “non-panel advocates”.

They have issued proposals to allow this move and also to allow solicitors to be in charge of the money that will be paid for advocacy services, so the solicitors will decide how much to pay any barrister they instruct.

Barristers have just one more week to respond to the proposals, which could mean that they are paid even less than if they had signed up to the panel and its rates for the complex trials.

Richard Collins, director of policy at the LSC, said: “Basically the Bar appears to be reneging on a deal agreed under the Carter review [of legal aid], in which it was accepted that junior barristers would be paid more, but QCs at the top, on the most expensive cases, would be paid less.

“It was quite explicit. In good faith, we put an extra £29 million into the fees scheme at the bottom end and the other side of the deal was that there would be this system of competition at the top end. That’s why we find it odd that the Bar is moving away from that.

“The fees that we are now offering are the fees that barristers themselves tendered for,” he said. “We offered three levels of fees and they bid at the lowest levels of fee. So how can they now say these levels are not enough?”

Mr Collins, who has suggested in a letter to Bar leaders that they are behind the widespread refusal to sign, in breach of competition law, added: “Individual barristers knew what they were bidding for and for some reason, as a matter of coincidence, and individually, they have reached a decision not to sign and that I find most worrying.”

He added that £100 million in criminal legal aid was spent on the top 100 trials involving about 400 defendants. The cut in fees would be only about 10 per cent. But younger barristers felt under pressure not to sign, he added. “We have been told that barristers wanted to sign but the pressure is too great: the profession is still one where the patronage of the senior Bar is very important to a career and it is very hard to go against that.”

Under the new scheme, a QC’s fees for preparation work will range from £91 to £145 an hour and those of a leading junior from £79 to £127 an hour. A junior acting alone will be paid £70 to £100 an hour.

Time in court will be paid at £476 a day for a QC and £390 for a leading junior. A junior acting alone will receive £285.

There is some private concern among solicitors that it will be difficult to find appropriately experienced barristers to take the cases on. One said: “The QCs won’t do it but even a junior alone might not be keen on under £300 a day.”

Mr Collins disagreed that solicitors would find difficulty securing barristers of the right experience to handle the trials. “They will be under a duty to find barristers of appropriate expertise.” And he rejects the notion that barristers are over a barrel. “We don’t want that. We just want people to sign up.”

Tim Dutton has now written further letters to the Ministry of Justice and the LSC pointing out the “adverse consequences of their actions for justice and the taxpayer”.

In turn he is accusing the commission of spreading “misinformation” — and in particular takes it to task over the extra £29 million that went into so-called graduated fees for junior barristers and the assertion that the Bar was better off by £24 million, as only £5 million was cut at the top end. “This is simply not true.

“The true facts are that junior barristers spent more than a decade — from 1996 to 2007 — with their pay frozen. Secondly, money was taken from senior barristers, savings from high-cost cases, and lower case volumes, to ensure that junior barristers were put back to where they had been in 1997. Thirdly, there was no new money whatsoever: in fact, spending overall on the Bar’s services has been reduced.” Finally, he adds, overall legal aid spending is being cut by 3.5 per cent a year.

The LSC says that it is prepared to review the scheme in 18 months’ time. Meanwhile, Dutton says that the Bar will “continue to press for a scheme based on a fee for work turned out, rather than the one being imposed in which hourly rate payments create a perverse incentive to work as many hours as possible”.

For the moment, though, the scheme appears to have failed to attract sufficient barristers to ensure that it can run efficiently. “The public,” he says, “will suffer as a result.”

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