Statistics Authority to review Legal Aid fees release

In January this year the Ministry of Justice (MoJ) released ad hoc statistics on the money paid to barristers from the public purse.

As we found at the time, many of the media reports overstated the likely earnings of barristers though Legal Aid by missing some important nuances. For example, the papers didn't account for the fact that barristers would have had to pay expenses and VAT on these earnings.

The UK Statistics Authority has now written to the MoJ to say that "insufficient information" was given in the release about the limitations of the figures and how they could be used. It also pointed out that the figure derived by some papers for a barrister's average income from public sources - £84,000 - could be problematic given that the analysis only looked at payments over £10,000. And it voiced concerns about the timing of the publication, coming as it did four days before well-publicised industrial action taken by some criminal lawyers in protest over the government's Legal Aid reforms.

The MoJ says it plans to request that the UKSA makes a full assessment of the release against the Code of Practice for Official Statistics.