CDS News

The LSC has announced that we will be terminating the current General Criminal Contract for criminal legal aid services with effect from 13 January 2008. We will award new general criminal contracts as an interim step before criminal providers are brought onto the Unified Contract.

Change will keep the criminal defence reform programme on track

The change is designed to keep the criminal defence reform programme on track following a judicial review of the new Unified Contract for civil work brought by the Law Society, which challenged the contract amendment clause.  

The substance and objectives of the legal aid reform programme were not challenged in any way by the judgment. It enabled the LSC to amend the Unified Contract to introduce new civil legal aid fee schemes from October 2007, although affected the LSC’s ability to amend any “technical specifications” in the contract, such as key performance indicators and Peer Review standards.

Decision taken to appeal judicial review

The LSC does not agree with the decision on amending ‘technical specifications’ or with the judge’s interpretation of some aspects of EU and domestic procurement law. We have therefore today announced that we will appeal.

Prior to the judicial review, it had been the LSC's intention to issue a notice of amendment to the existing General Criminal Contract from October.

However, the General Criminal Contract was entered into some time before the legal aid reform programme was announced and providers would not have been aware of the proposed reforms at the time they signed. Because of this and the uncertainty arising from the Unified Contract judgment, the LSC will not now issue the notice of amendment.

What are we doing?

Instead, the LSC intends shortly to:

• terminate the existing General Criminal Contract with effect from 13 January 2008
• run an open process leading to the award of new contracts which will operate for six months from 14 January 2008. The tender process will start towards the end of September 2007
• re-allocate duty solicitor work and issue rotas on that basis for the six months of the new contract.

Legal aid reforms for criminal work that were to have been implemented from October will now be incorporated into the new criminal contract which will come into effect from 14 January 2008. These are:

• new Police Station fixed fees and revised boundary areas
• expansion of the Defence Solicitor Call Centre to ‘own client’ work
• expansion of CDS Direct to those elements of ‘own client’ work suitable for telephone advice
• introduction of the Very High Cost Case contracting panel (to run for 18 months, as previously announced).

We intend to introduce the Litigators Graduated Fee Scheme at the same time, subject to the outcome of the consultation.

The LSC intends to introduce the Unified Contract for criminal legal aid services from July 2008. It is proposed that this will continue to run until, subject to consultation, it is replaced by contracts let through a process of Best Value Tendering.

For more information

View our press release for full details.

We have published a response to our Slot Allocation for duty solicitors consultation today.

A Questions & Answers document on this announcement is below:

Q&A on General Criminal Contract announcement (PDF, 60 kb)