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Legal Aid

I believe that the hon. Gentleman is talking about some research by LECG for the Law Society that estimated the number of firms that would either close down or merge; it dealt not with people going out of the profession but with merger or change. However, its work was based on a course that has never been pursued—that there would be a minimum contract size of £150,000. As I said, there is no minimum contract size, but the only one that was ever countenanced was £50,000. Carter thought that, overall, there would be some fall-out, but he too was countenancing a minimum contract. However, there is no fixed view on that. As I said, we have localised the way that we hope to be able to configure the changes, to try to fit what is already there. During the consultation, solicitors asked for competitive tendering to start as quickly as possible after they had moved over to fixed fees, so that they could adjust their businesses to fixed fees and then quickly seek to set the fees themselves by making a bid. Consequently, we have narrowed the time between introducing fixed fees and introducing bidding by one year—there is now only one year between the two processes—to take account of that. It is better that firms make competitive bids for work that take account of their actual running costs and required profit margins, rather than requiring the LSC to second-guess fair fee rates in the absence of hard information on the true costs firms incur in providing services, which is what happens now.