Quote ="Lord Elpers"I think you are mistaken. You have chosen an example of greed working. For a serious fraud case to be stopped after defendants claimed they could not get adequate representation because of cuts to legal aid is a first. What a great defence. The government has reduced the legal aid fees in very high cost cases (VHCC) by 30% so we now have barristers refusing to take VHCC because now a QC will only earn about £100,000 for working on it and a junior barrister will now earn only £60,000. These latter day Rumpoles may be feeling just a slight pinch but you can hardly say this is austerity.'" it's a good job you haven't relied on figures from an untrustworthy source with form for overestimating barristers personal income isn't it. www.statisticsauthority.gov.uk/r ... 032014.pdf Oh.........

Quote ="Lord Elpers"I think you are mistaken. You have chosen an example of greed working. For a serious fraud case to be stopped after defendants claimed they could not get adequate representation because of cuts to legal aid is a first. What a great defence. The government has reduced the legal aid fees in very high cost cases (VHCC) by 30% so we now have barristers refusing to take VHCC because now a QC will only earn about £100,000 for working on it and a junior barrister will now earn only £60,000. These latter day Rumpoles may be feeling just a slight pinch but you can hardly say this is austerity.'" it's a good job you haven't relied on figures from an untrustworthy source with form for overestimating barristers personal income isn't it. www.statisticsauthority.gov.uk/r ... 032014.pdf Oh.........

A thing or two about qualifying as a barrister.

The quickest way to do this is, generally, to do a qualifying law degree. This lasts for 3 years. You then pay a whopping £17K to do the Bar Professional Training Course (formerly the Bar Vocational Course). Which takes a year.

The next stage is possibly the hardest in the whole process. You have to get something called pupillage, which is basically an apprenticeship year working as a trainee barrister, or pupil as they are called in the profession. So that's 5 years in total before you are a proper barrister, assuming you go straight through the system without any delay.

Pupillage is hotly contested, with chambers frequently getting 200-500 applications per pupillage on offer. Statistically speaking, your chances of getting a pupillage are around 20%, and if you don't get one within 5 years of completing the BPTC you start looking for a new career.

Assuming you want to work in crime expect to be paid £12K - £15K for your pupillage year (compared with £40K in a commerical set). Once you complete this you are then a fully qualified barrister. Hopefully the chambers you did you pupillage at will take you on, but they might not. In which case you are looking for a new chambers.

Assume you are taken on. So, you have made it and are ready to start earning the big bucks. Wrong!

You are self-employed. You fund all your own expenses. You fund all your own professional development. You will travel all over the country doing y little hearings in return for peanuts. Before you are allowed to do anything half-decent.

Instructing solicitors will be slow in paying you, your clerk will not chase them because the chambers you are at will want work from them. And you will not chase them for fear that they will not send you future work. (I know people who were receiving cheques in 2012 for work carried out in 2009.)

You will be up all night prepping cases and you can kiss goodbye to a social life or other half.

Eventually you might get some good cases, but even then don't expect to earn much more than £25K in your first couple of years. Being self-employed, you will have to make your own pension contributions and there is no holiday pay.

After around 2 years you will realise that the bloke selling second hand Mondeos down the local car garage is making more money then you, and you will either diversify you practice away from criminal law, or leave the profession altogether.

I have friends practising crime who are 5 years qualified. They earn around £40K per annum before tax, possibly slightly less. Legal Aid pay rates are so poor (not been increased since the mid 90s) that it is very difficult to earn more.

The only people earning much more are very experienced (10 years + qualified) and probably working on serious cases all the time. Or people doing the VHCC stuff.

The junior end of the independent criminal Bar is absolutely stuffed. And the going rate for a junior CPS barrister is about £35K.

Either way, there is bugger all money in criminal law. The average earnings of a criminal barrister are about £37K before tax. And people are leaving to do other stuff in droves.

You probably think this is a good thing, and that there are too many 'fat cat' lawyers. And whilst £37K may be a decent salary in Hull, it is bugger all in London.

And trust me, when you are the one picked by up the police for something you haven't done, you will be demanding the best representation. And you won't get it. Because anyone half-decent will have left to practise something else worth doing.

In the alternative, you may find yourself in crown court being represented by a solicitor-advocate. They have never done a pupillage and get their Higher Rights of Audience on a 3 day course with a quick exam at the end. And it shows.

Seems like the free marketeers ain't so keen on a free market when it costs them money...

It would be nice if HM Government could apply the same principle of "We have a sum of money in mind and we won't pay you a penny more" to, for instance, housing benefit.

So with them not being over-keen on funding local authorities to provide affordable long term rents they could issue private landlords with a cheque every month and tell them what the rent is going to be this year, and next etc etc - a quick tweak of the law would be all that is required to compel private landlords to accept the government valuation of what a rent should be according to what HM Government can afford to give out in housing benefit and if HM Government send a single tenant to occupy a two bed property then the landlord stands the bedroom tax too. Private landlords would then obviously have the option to opt out and find their own tenants on the marketplace, or opt in and have a guaranteed supply chain.

See how things will work when I'm in charge ?

More and more stats are becoming available which makes you point of view a very pessimistic one. The latest GfK-NOP consumer confidence index last week showed overall confidence at its's highest level since June 2007. The optimists outnumber the pessimists about their personal financial position over the last 12 months, and about the country's prospects. This would not happen if most were feeling as grim as you and Labour suggest.

The Labour market numbers give further evidence, apart from showing the continuing strong rise in employment, they show that the benefits of the recovery are not only well spread but believe it or not the highest paid are perhaps lagging behind!

Private sector pay in the last three three months figures was up by 2% - which was ahead of CPI inflation (1.6%). The private sector accounts for 81% of employment. Of this manufacturing was up 3.2% on a year earlier, construction was up 3.1% while wholesaling/retailing/hotels and restaurants (all usually lower payers) was up by 3.5%. These not only outstripped CPI inflation but also RPI inflation (2.5%)

Interestingly finance and business pay was up just 0.1% dragged down by falling earnings in financial services - the opposite of what Labour would have you believe.

The rise in GDP is well spread between the different sectors of the economy and is benefitting the majority of people. The longer the recovery goes on, the more those benefits will spread. Of course no one can say if the recover will continue as we have the election next year with a risk of a change of government and direction and also a possible rise in interest rates.

Don't you just love completely meaningless statements like that

Meaningless to you because it shows the recovery denying pessimists to be wrong - Meaningful to the majority who see a brighter future.

An excellent summary that tallies with my experience. In addition to that, someone I know had to write off £10000 in unpaid fees as she would have been taxed on them after a certain period, even though she had no chance of getting them for the reasons you give. This after the law was changed to tax barristers on billed fees, rather than earned/paid fees.

Unfortunately the media portrayal of fat-cat barristers is now the pervading view, much like welfare "scroungers" and feckless immigrants.

Thats pretty much in line with every other form of self employment where taxation is made on profit based on annual turnover including any outstanding creditors at year end.

I hope you are right, however stats on earnings are, I believe, still largly derived from quarterly surveys of a selected range of businesses by the ONS, my business was one of them and indeed one of the questions was "Are you more optomistic" which in itself is pretty meaningless because you wouldn't be investing your own money, your house, and the family horse on something that you weren't optomistic with in the first place.

It always puzzled me why the ONS relied on a survey targeted at one specific employee within the business (a random sample but one that your stats had to be based on constantly after that) and not genuine monthly income tax returns, presumably the ONS never had access to those records and presumably HMRC still don't give them access - so we're stuck with a system that measures whatever you feel like putting on the form without ever having to prove what you've just written but with the threat over your head that if you don't send it back then it was a criminal offence.

Rather amusingly the person in my business that they selected as a sample was my brother and of course we always told the truth about his earnings and optomism.

Its meaningless because it quantifies nothing, I would guess that confidence has been the highest since 2007 a number of times this month already, unless you back it with real figures then it means nowt.

The GfK-NOP consumer confidence index has been running since 1974 and is accepted and used as a barometer to show how the country is really feeling. It has been used in the past to highlight the public's worries during the recession.

You question the stats on earnings but again they are the same stats with the same methodology that Labour and the government critics have been using since 2010 to show earnings were below inflation. To now suggest these stats somehow are not vaild shows an argument that is also not valid.

If your business (or your brother's) is seeing not the benefits of the recovery and is still struggling, then it is in the minority of cases according to the stats and I hope things pick up for you. However if as you imply your brother has been pessimistic in completing his form when in fact he could have been optimistic, then this would mean the real situation is even better than I reported!

The GfK-NOP index has been running since 1974 and has been used since then to show the public's real feelings and show how optimistic or pessimistic they are feeling. As results are compared it gives a guide to show trends and has been accepted by business and government. As I said - meaningless to you perhaps but not to the majority.

If you had read all of my post you would have seen I did quote real figures which backed up the Gfk-NOP index.

Here is a few more facts for you.

1. The lastest quarterly rise in GDP of 0.8% takes us within a wisker (0.6%) of its pre-crisis peak.
2. If you exclude the declining North Sea oil and gas we are already 0.4% above the pre-crisis levels.
3. If you exclude financial services (which has seen a 21% drop in activity) the GDP is about 2% up on its pre-crisis peak.
4. The double-dip recession never happened let alone a triple one as spun by Ed 'I gave away our gold' Balls-Up.

Points 2 & 3 above show the economy is recovering across the board as it has almost overcome the huge handicap of an ongoing major decline in North Sea and Financial Services revenues which were no fault of this government. That it has taken longer than predicted is really understandable given that since 2010 we have also had the perilous euro crisis and an EU in recession to contend with as well.

There are many who would say the same about the Jeremy Vine Show

More like the Jeremy Kyle Show since Thatcher and successive governments since have gone out of their way to create and nurture the underclass that they can now target this countries woes upon.

My only point was that the ONS earnings stats always have been based on voluntary declaration of earnings of a random sample of employees with no requirement to prove them, the only threat made with the quarterley form being that if you don't return it you will be prosecuted - that in itself was always enough to get my back up.

The forms could be completed with entirely made-up numbers and no-one would ever know - quite why they couldn't just ask HMRC what the personal income tax receipts were like this month is beyond me.

As always I'm sceptical about all politicians and their lies but when you know that their "facts" rely on nothing more than unsubstantiated submissions from random samples then you learn to ignore them.

More worryingly in connection with my post a couple of pages ago was the announcement yesterday that people on JSA will not be allowed to turn down an offer of employment made on a zero hours contract and will be sanctioned if they do, proof that the zero hours issue is here for the long term as a viable and approved method of employment, fine if you're not affected (I'm not and no-one in my family is) but not a good place for anyone to find themselves if they have any plans for owning a house, a loan for a car, credit card, etc, etc.

As for my business, sold it in 2007 when the market was about to fall off the cliff, now work for the organisation that I sold out to and thinking about it as I don't have a contract of employment I suppose I am on a zero hour basis too...

All polls are based on samples which depend on the public being truthful. They do not pretend to be a science but show trends which usually prove to be reasonably accurate. Fortunately the majority of the British public are honest.



As against the lies of people like your brother.




So when you state "my business" what you don't really mean that.

Is your brother still being selected to fill in the forms?

Gone a bit quiet about the nonsense you made up about Barristers and the failings of austerity haven't you?

Busy with your other username?

Nothing more to say. I have stated my views and my practice doesn't do criminal work so not an expert in this area of law like your goodself.

However I note you have gone a bit quiet regarding all the good news of the George Osborne led recovery



Which would that be then?

That's great. I challenged you as knowing bugger all about the criminal bar, and now you have admitted it.

Ironic that, given that you asked me to prove I had some knowledge of the area.

No. I do not believe I admitted to "knowing bugger all about the criminal bar". I said my legal practice does not do criminal work. Quite another matter.

And in any case these forums allow different opinions to be expressed. You have yours and I have mine.

Your inaccuracy and lack of precision rather indcates that your legal knowlege is recycled stuff from the internet -not a qualification accepted by the Bar Standards Board last time I looked.

Elpers, like all Tories, admits nothing, casts assertions and can't back them up nor will he/she answer direct questions.
It's sad that the system has let these kind of people down.
Even sadder is they don't realise it has happened to them.

A couple of very strange responses there which don't really make any sense.

If the ONS are still writing to the Ltd Company then I wouldn't be surprised but since its six years since we wound it up then they may have realised by now that the mail is not being returned.

Here is another one for you Elpers: A law firm spent 869 hours reviewing of CCTV on a serious case, only to be told that, owing to the perverse way criminal legal aid works, not a minute of the time was chargeable owing to the fact the evidence was provided on CD: www.lawgazette.co.uk/5041180.art ... =GAZ090514 And this is why decent lawyers, in both of the main branches of the profession (solicitors and barristers) are leaving criminal law. Soon it will be nothing more than a playground for trust-fund kids and those with wealthy spouses.

Here is another one for you Elpers: A law firm spent 869 hours reviewing of CCTV on a serious case, only to be told that, owing to the perverse way criminal legal aid works, not a minute of the time was chargeable owing to the fact the evidence was provided on CD: www.lawgazette.co.uk/5041180.art ... =GAZ090514 And this is why decent lawyers, in both of the main branches of the profession (solicitors and barristers) are leaving criminal law. Soon it will be nothing more than a playground for trust-fund kids and those with wealthy spouses.

Whoops. www.telegraph.co.uk/news/politic ... crash.html

Whoops. www.telegraph.co.uk/news/politic ... crash.html