Examination of Witnesses (Questions 175
- 179)
TUESDAY 23 MARCH 2004
STEPHEN IRWIN
QC, ANDREW HALL
QC, ANDREW MCFARLANE
QC AND MERERID
EDWARDS
Q175 Chairman: Ms Edward, gentlemen,
welcome. At the moment you outnumber us but that situation will
not last very long.
Mr Irwin: Would you forgive me
if I try to pick up some of the strands we have read and heard
and help you with two or three things to start with?
Chairman: What we might like to do is
to raise some issues on which we are fairly determined to get
answers from you. If, having done so, you feel that we have not
covered some ground or some points which have come up previously,
by all means indicate that and I shall certainly give you the
opportunity to do so. I think you will find that in the things
we want to ask you, we are quite deliberately going to go over
precisely some of the same ground because we want to know your
view about it as well.
Q176 Mr Clappison: You may have heard
me earlier asking the Law Society about the effect of increased
debts through tuition fees. Could I put the same general subject
to you, especially in the light of what Nigel Bastin has told
us, who is the head of education and training at the Bar Council?
He has indicated that following the introduction of top-up fees,
in his estimation it would cost almost £38,000 to complete
the professional training requirements to become a member of the
Bar, not including the costs which somebody would incur during
pupillage, after they completed their professional examinations.
What effect do you think this will have on the desirability of
a career doing legal aid work?
Mr Irwin: We can already show
that it is having an effect. We have prepared a bar chart for
you, which we would ask you to look at. Set alongside the article
by Mr Bastin, which is in the bundle, and I am not going to read
that out, the bar chart tells us a very interesting story of pupillage.
For the non-lawyer members, you need to do 12 months pupillage
so that the unit of training is a pupillage year; it is sometimes
split in two. We can show you on the bar chart. If you look at
2000-01, you have the traditional pattern of just under 700 pupillage
years, that is people going through pupillage during that year,
and just over 500 tenancies, which is the final career step of
being let into chambers. If you looked back a few years, you would
see there was a bigger difference between the two, but there are
certainly always more pupillages than tenancies.
Q177 Mr Clappison: Is it right that
pupillages were not always paid until fairly recently?
Mr Irwin: Pupillages were not
always paid and rather more than half of them were paid by this
point.
Q178 Mr Clappison: They are now;
pupillages have to be paid now.
Mr Irwin: As from the latest figures,
they are compulsorily paid. If you travel across the chart you
see a unique, unprecedented effect, which is that by the time
you get to 2002-03 we have fewer people completing pupillage and
coming into tenancy.
Q179 Chairman: You used to complain
that it was the other way round.
Mr Irwin: We never complained,
because you always need competition at each stage in the gradient.
What we are now finding is that we do not have enough people in
pupillage to maintain the current tenancy recruitment numbers.
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